I’m no brainstorming zealot - there are many ways idea generation techniques out there and they all have their place. However now and then brainstorming, as a concept, gets attacked, which is almost as ridiculous as a war on terror. Recently Marc Andresen had a short post called Brainstorming is a bad idea that deserves a response.

Rarely discussed factors that impact the value of brainstorming:

1. What problem are you trying to solve?. If the goal is raw numbers of ideas you might be better off with other methods, which Andresen points out (via a quote from the excellent book The Medici Effect). However if you want people to share in the creative process, get buzzed by riffing off each others ideas, having them all in a room together is very useful. Brainstorming, as an occasional group activity has benefits beyond the ideas themselves. Some techniques are better for generating ideas early on in a project, and others are better for finding ideas for specific problems late in a project.
2. Who is running the brainstorming session?. The facilitator who runs the room can make or kill any brainstorming session. It’s up to them to manage the room, keep things fun and fast, to make sure ideas are written down, and to prevent ratholes from happening, or blowhards taking over the room. It’s a role most people don’t perform well and the skill rarely has anything to do with seniority.
3. Who is in the room? Even with a great facilitator, if the people in the room hate each other, are morons, are afraid to be creative, or simply have horrible chemistry, the session is bound to fail. In many situations it’s best to keep brainstorming meetings small - large groups have more complicated dynamics that groups of 4 or 5.
4. Is anyone informed on the actual method?. The term brainstorming is often used as the sloppy label for any number of half-baked idea generation techniques. The actual term comes from Alex Osborn’s 1953 book Applied Imagination. The technique, as he defined it, compensates for many of the complaints most people have about the ad-hoc group creativity attempts they’ve experienced.

I’ve yet to see a single study that controlled for, or even mentioned these factors - which is entirely unfair to evaluating brainstorming, or any creative thinking technique. If I’ve missed some research you know of, please leave a comment.

Further reading:

• How to run a brainstorming meeting. I’ve run a crazy number of brainstorming meetings in my life and made every mistake there is. This essay is my tip sheet for running them right.
• The Myths of Innovation. My book goes in depth on various misnomers about creative thinking, innovation and the history of invention, including how epiphanies happen and the role of techniques like brainstorming.
• COM597 Syllabus from University of Washington. This is the syllabus for the UW course I taught on creativity and ideas, and it shows one approach to exploring the many methods of creative thinking.
• Applied Imagination, By Alex Osborn. I discuss this book in detail in The Myths of Innovation and highly recommend it to anyone who runs or participates in brainstorming sessions.

(Thanks to Gernot Ross for the tip)

Posted in Innovation, creative thinking | 8 Comments »

The book is still getting some great buzz, and I’m on the road much of the next few months talking about the book. Here are some upcoming gigs:

July 25, OSCON, Portland, OR
August 10, Amazon.com, Seattle
August 14, Whitepages.com, Seattle
August 24, Expedia.com, Seattle
Sept 21, Management Week, SpiderProject Inc, Kiev, Ukraine
Sept 25-29, Web Directions South, Sydney, Australia
Oct 21-23, Adaptive Path’s MX-East, Philadelphia, PA
Nov 5-8, User Interface 12, Cambridge MA

If you’re in Seattle and you have a possible venue for me to speak at, let me know.

Posted in On Tour | 2 Comments »

I’m working w/O’Reilly on an updated 2nd edition of The art of project management.

We’re brainstorming ideas for how to improve the book, but agreed to start with you folks. How can we improve the book? Here are a few ideas, but feel free to add your own.

If you have longer suggestions/gripes or want to help with the 2nd edition, leave a comment.

Posted in art of project management | 21 Comments »

Hi there. If you’ve noticed I’ve been running all over the place doing talks, interviews, and magic tricks to promote the new book. Well my plans for this summer are as follows: stay home!

Wanted: Venues for a lecture on the Myths of Innovation
When: This summer / early fall
Why: I’m a great speaker, it’s a great book and it’s good for you!
Where: Seattle, eastside, wherever you are

If you work somewhere that has an invited speaker series, or some other way of drawing a crowd, let me know. I can’t promise I’ll speak everywhere, but I’ll give it my best shot.

If you want a flavor of what my talks are like, here are sample videos of me in action.

Posted in On Tour | 1 Comment »

I’ll be talking about topics from the Myths of Innovation at OSCON (Open Source Convention) on July 25th at 5pm and at Powells Technical bookstore at 6pm on Thursday July 26th.

If anyone wants to meet-up and grab lunch or coffee while I’m in town, leave a comment. Hope to see you.

Posted in On Tour | 2 Comments »

There are two excellent posts on Dare Obsjano’s blog about innovation in big companies. The first is on innovation lessons from Google, the second on Stupid things big companies do. Two worthwhile reads.

(Thanks to Scott Hanselman for the tip)

Posted in Innovation, Management | 1 Comment »

FOO Camp saw the power combo of two different social software technologies: Crowdvine, a linked-in type system for pre & post conference connection making, and pathable (which I first saw at Bizjam) for guiding people in finding folks to meet.

Here’s a short review:

It works and its fun. Bravo! The premise is simple: weeks before the event log in, list some tags, and ping people you might know attending the event. It’s easy to find people who share your interests (via tags), read their bios, and ping them if you so desire. There’s a comment system so you can leave notes which was surprisingly active, and public: going to the home page for the site shows all activity, from blog posts made by an individual, to comments sent or received. Anyone can jump in on the threads which was interesting (and I wondered if it’d work for a 500 or 1000 person conference).

At a minimum crowdvine helped me match faces to names before the event which is a big deal for networking or meeting specific people. And it was voluntary - had I been annoyed or less social, I didn’t have to participate at all.

Pathable provided the event badges, fueled by their social matching system - based on tags and other magic they grouped individuals by interest (represented by the color of each badge and the color of the crowdvine profile, see photo above) and created the surprisingly popular matches/opposites lists for every person.

Much like at bizjam, the badges got people talking. It made introducing people to each other much easier as being someone’s opposite or match was an easy way to start a conversation.

Gripes:

Only problems were mild integration issues. There was a wiki for FOO that didn’t integrate with anything else, a photo wall, with tagish Q&A, at FOO that had different photos for people than crowdvine, little things like that that I’m not sure need to be fixed. Someone needs to do a user experience analysis on how many different places and systems ask for personal/social info and check that any redundancies are useful or fun in some way.

After the event I noticed it was possible for me to track what sessions I’d been to in Crowdvine, but wasn’t sure why it was worth the time - perhaps to follow up with people I’d met but didn’t grab their contact info? Not sure.

Summary:

Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.

Posted in Teaching/Training, Web 2.0 / social software | 6 Comments »

Watching fireworks last night, I wondered about the distance between modern July 4th celebrations and what we’re actually celebrating (more ranting on holidays here). In my lifetime I don’t remember any hint of recounting what happened or why at any July 4th event - it’s just a BBQ, beers and fireworks - that’s the entire substance of the day as far as I can recall. Which is great fun, for sure, but shallow in light of what happened and why.

I asked folks around me when the last time they read the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. No one could remember. Few knew they’re so short - 1300 and 7600 words long respectively (about 15 pages) and can be read easily in 15 minutes.

I woke up this morning and read them both. They’re easy reads and I wish somehow reading these things would be part of the July 4th tradition. Can you rally a nation in 1300 words, or define a government in 8000? Now that’s writing.

References:

• Decleration of Independence
• U.S. Constitution
• History of the 4th of July: on wikipedia, & U.S. History.org

Posted in On writing | 7 Comments »

_{(Photo by Nobihaya)}

No matter what my expectations are for O’Reilly’s annual FOO camp, an intense social/geek/intellectual weekend run by my publisher, O’Reilly Media, they’re always surpassed in amazing ways. Unlike any other conference type event, I leave with a head full of ideas to chase and renewed passion for hunting them down.

I waited a week to write something up to see what stood out after things had time to settle. This year my thoughts were about what other events might learn from the success of FOO - here’s my short list (including some hard to avoid for narrative clarity name-droppings):

• Informality breeds conversation. There are some amazing and famous people running around at FOO. Founder of this, inventor of that - people I’d normally avoid in ego-fear or fanboy embarrassment. But having everyone camp outdoors with no “invited speakers” or “keynotes” neutralizes pretensions. Egos are left at home and everyone is willing to share, chat, laugh and listen. FOO is full of bullshit neutralizers and that enables fantastic experiences.
• Level playing fields are more fun. I did a talk on my book the Myths of Innovation and noticed Ray Ozzie and other notables in the audience. Now at any normal conference I’d be (happily) in the seats, listening to them. But because anyone can do a session the dynamic is entirely non-hierarchical and self-motivated. New conversations happen. Experiments ensue. Comical mistakes are made. This is the spirit of unconferences: you never know who will show up, or what will happen, but the bet is if you get out of people’s way they’ll sort it out themselves. People go where they aren’t supposed to and discover things. It forces opinions and new conversations to rise which is what most organizers claim their conferences are for.
• Soft skills rule. I went to two sessions on amazing topics, with awesome, world class level people in the room, but surprise! They sucked anyway. Why? The self-selected session organizers failed to work the room - they let rat-hole debates go on forever, chatterboxes hold the floor too long, or held the group captive with their extended rambles. The lesson: despite all the geniuses in a room, once you’re a group, it’s communication, more than intellectual talent, that make things work. FOO averages much higher quality sessions than most conferences, but Unconferences and regular conferences hinge on rewarding people with facilitation and public speaking skills. But sadly it’s still not cool to reward soft skills. I think every unconference should offer optional, but recommended, training on running good sessions. Regular conferences are just as bad: I don’t know of one that offers training, or mentoring, for speakers.

Memorable moments:

• Erin McKean’s session on making up words. Not sure my editors would have endorsed her enthusiasm for me, and everyone, making up words, but I loved it.
• How to eat like a caveman. Eric Wilhelm, of Squid Labs fame, co-ran this unexpectedly memorable session on hunter/gatherer diets, and the problems with modern food. This was the perfect mixture of lecture, Q&A, recommendations, stories and theory.
• Meeting dozens of cool people including Gareth Branwyn, Dale Dougherty (Editor of Make magazine), Dylan Field (he’s in high school!), Mitch Kapor and Bill Gurstelle (Mr. Backyard Ballistics).
• On Sara Peyton’s prompting, handing Google founder Larry Paige a copy of the Myths of Innovation, and asking, entirely sarcastically, if he knew anything about innovation. His response, with a smile “Innovation? What’s that?”.

It was a thrill to be there again and I hope to be invited back.

Background on FOO:

• Tim O’Reilly’s writeup from ‘07.
• FOO Camp article on wikipedia and CNN.
• How to run a great unconference session.
• Self-generated session list from FOO 07.

Posted in On Tour, Teaching/Training | 3 Comments »