Jump Start Your Business

Tweet

5:10 P.M.
Time-out

Hall, his staff, and the Trained Brains descend the steep stairway to his candlelit wine cellar. Hall pours a California champagne into paper cups and toasts the day's efforts. "We've got gobs of stuff. Some of it's in scrambled pieces, but we're in good shape. They want to start earlier tomorrow morning, though, so they can catch an earlier flight. We can do that, but it's going to be a long night," he announces to the core group who will stay on after dinner, adding, "Sleep is for wimps."

6:00 P.M.
Dinner

Dinner is fortifying comfort food--meat loaf and mashed potatoes--that almost everybody carries back to the living room, where the conversations, inevitably, keep circling back to the bigger ideas that bubbled up earlier in the day.

"I really like the idea of that," says Siegel, restating his affection for the artist's package design.

"A breakthrough there," says Hall, "and the company triples in size."

7:14 P.M.
Tactic: Categorize ideas, write product concepts

The night's work is task oriented. David Wecker's at a computer in the mansion's library. His first assignment: conceptualizing a new line of Celestial Teas, a faux-British offering called Royaltea. One room back, Eric Schultz is positioning an entirely new beverage for Celestial. Upstairs, in her office, with New Age music playing in the background, Sandie Glass works to corral and expand upon the far-ranging ideas generated for those themed kits. Everybody else is in the living room, taking turns punching up jukebox favorites while working to bring a bit of order to the morning's intentionally chaotic upwelling of ideas. That group includes Trained Brain Jeff Stamp; Mo Siegel; Lindsay Moore, Celestial's senior director of innovation and creativity; Keith Brenner, a consultant specializing in strategic planning and formerly Celestial's vice-president of marketing; and mansion apprentice Sean McCosh.

While McCosh sifts through the stack of purple Mind Dumpster cards, pulling out any remotely viable notions that went unmentioned during the day's sessions, the others begin separating the wheat from the chaff on the more than two dozen Flapdoodle sheets. Hall's instruction: write any promising near-term idea on a red index card; longer-term notions or those requiring licensing go on yellow cards. Hall then ducks out to visit a student art show at his daughter's school.

9:00 P.M.
More sifting

Hall returns an hour and a half later, dressed even more comfortably than before in red shorts, an oversize yellow T-shirt, and a blue University of Maine hockey cap worn backwards. Again, he's got bare feet. Arranged on the living-room rug are seven rows of index cards, each row 8 to 10 cards deep: the cards represent about five dozen ideas with varying degrees of marketplace potential, generated in less than 12 hours. The Eureka! Mansion has worked its preliminary magic--something it's becoming well known for. A couple of years ago, the University of Oklahoma's Arthur VanGundy compared various idea-sparking strategies with Hall's Eureka! Stimulus Response methods. VanGundy asked his groups and Hall's to come up with different ideas for snack foods. Hall's groups outperformed all the others, generating not only more ideas for new products but also far more meaningful ideas (as judged by a panel of food-industry experts). Most striking was the gap between traditional, unstimulated, brain-draining groups of four, which generated an average of 6.5 marketworthy ideas in 45 minutes, versus Hall's Eureka! groups, which averaged 36.3 meaningful ideas, or 558% more. "I was totally amazed," says VanGundy, who's been known to hire some of Hall's Trained Brains for his own creativity sessions. "I'd hold Doug up as a model of the principles I've been talking about for years."

Asked for three must-have ingredients in running a successful idea-generating session, VanGundy thinks a minute and replies: "One, people must have a belief that anything is possible. Two, you need a climate that's conducive to creative thinking, one that results in a playful atmosphere. Groups that are laughing and having the most fun are the groups producing the most ideas and the best ideas. Three, it's best to use a lot of different types of stimuli, which are both related to the challenge and unrelated to the challenge, to help trigger new associations and generate out-of-the-box thinking."

Just as crucial, he stresses, is avoiding the mistakes commonly made by corporations when they try to throw the creativity switch, all too often by rounding up the usual suspects and tossing them into a conference room for a couple of hours and ordering in sandwiches. "You don't want the same people who work together and meet together all the time," says VanGundy. "If you want to do something truly different, you have to meet differently." Meeting off-site is best. VanGrundy recommends bringing in people from different parts of the company, people with a diversity of viewpoints, making sure to salt the group with fluent idea generators. Another creativity killer starting with a whole bunch of criteria. "Companies will often start idea sessions by listing criteria for the new product or process. That places constraints on your thinking and forces people to limit their ideas. It creates a climate in which, instead of diverging in all sorts of directions to create as many ideas as you can, you're continually converging to evaluate all the ideas to see if they satisfy the criteria. It limits the number of possible ideas you can come up with and probably the quality of the ideas as well. There are three times you can judge an idea: now, later, and never. Now is not the right time."

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: