630: Better Ways to Lead Brainstorming, with Jeremy Utley

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May 15, 2023

Jeremy Utley, Director of Executive Education at Stanford's d.school, dives into the world of brainstorming. He reveals that most leaders underestimate the sheer volume of ideas needed for innovation—2,000 to one! Discussing cognitive closure, he explains how familiar solutions can stifle creativity. Jeremy offers fresh tactics for effective brainstorming, emphasizing low-barrier prototyping and problem framing. By fostering collaborative environments and embracing failures, he suggests teams can turn brainstorming into a continuous journey of innovation.

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INSIGHT

Cognitive Closure in Brainstorming

Brainstorming sessions often fail due to our inherent dislike for the unknown, called cognitive closure.
People tend to latch onto the first plausible solution, regardless of quality, to escape this discomfort.

INSIGHT

Einstelling Effect

The Einstelling effect, or cognitive fixation, hinders creativity by making us rely on existing patterns.
This leads to choosing suboptimal solutions and ceasing the search for better alternatives, even when told they exist.

ADVICE

Focus on Inputs

Focus on inputs, not just outputs, during brainstorming.
Consider the cognitive building blocks or "Legos" available and how they connect to form new ideas.

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Jeremy Utley: Ideaflow

Jeremy Utley is the Director of Executive Education at the Stanford d.school, and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering, where he has earned multiple favorite professor distinctions from graduate programs. He co-teaches two celebrated courses, Leading Disruptive Innovation (d.leadership) and LaunchPad, which focus on creating real-world impact with the tools of design & innovation.

He is also on the teaching teams of d.org, an organizational design course, and Transformative Design, a course that turns the tools of design onto graduate students’ lives. One of the most prodigious collaborators at the d.school, Jeremy has taught alongside the likes of Lecrae, Dan Ariely, Laszlo Bock, and Greg McKeown. He is the author along with Perry Klebahn of Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters.

Brainstorming sessions often emerge to address a problem requiring new ideas or innovation. However, the way many of us approach brainstorming vastly limits what’s possible for our teams and organizations. In this conversation, Jeremy and I discuss where leaders go wrong and some of the most helpful mindsets and tactics to do better.

Key Points

We tend to like cognitive closure. That often stops us from moving forward more substantially during brainstorming.
The Idea Ratio shows that 2000 ideas are needed for every one idea that goes to market. Most teams and organizations vastly underestimate this.
Set the expectation that brainstorming is a process, not a single event. That will help you surface vastly more useful ideas.
Gather initial suggestions before a session to avoid favoring extroverts and early anchoring on what’s said initially. A useful way to make this is ask the language, “How might we…?”
Warm-up exercises can substantially help put team members in the right mindset for creativity, especially for those with busy schedules moving between contexts.

Resources Mentioned

Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn
Jeremy Utley’s website

Interview Notes

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Related Episodes

How to Be Present, with Dan O’Connor (episode 399)
The Way to Nurture New Ideas, with Safi Bahcall (episode 418)
How to Build an Invincible Company, with Alex Osterwalder (episode 470)

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