The CRAZY Secret to Generating Innovative Solutions
What Google, Carnegie Mellon, & Future Partners design sprints share in common.
“Brainstorm!”
How many times have you found yourself in a group at the whiteboard or before sheets of paper, coffee at the ready, sticky notes and sharpies in hand, this single word ringing through your ears? Are you inspired? Are you ready to be creative, bold––innovative, even?
Nope.
I find it ironic that brainstorming, a practice I’ve been implementing throughout my life, has become so uninspiring to me that it has become a paradox in and of itself. But maybe that’s because the way we use brainstorming today is not how its creator envisioned it, and maybe it’s not very effective in the first place.
However, this is not an article about why brainstorming isn’t good enough. I want to talk about alternatives that I’ve seen implemented at successful organizations, ones that I’ve used consistently myself. And reassure you that there are better, faster, and more efficient ways to come up with creative, innovative solutions.
The Crazy Ingredient
I’ve been to several hackathons and design sprints while I study IxD at CCA, and I recently had the opportunity to participate in a Google-style design sprint at the company’s San Francisco office. It was there that I realized that there’s a simple trending practice connecting Google, CMU’s HCI department, and Future Partners:
- Google’s Crazy 8's
- CMU’s Chainstorming & Cheatstorming
- Future Partner’s Think Wrong principle
Each call it by a different name, but the overarching principle — the secret ingredient to creative, innovative solutions — is to think quickly and randomly without bias.
The crazy ingredient is literally craziness. It’s ok to be random or silly or farfetched. It’s about generating ideas without worrying about what your teammates will think, or whether your ideas are possible or not.
So, it’s not as secret as you might think. Especially when you realize that the creator of brainstorming recognized it too: “Any and all ideas are considered legitimate and often the most far-fetched are the most fertile.” But then, over the years we’ve forgotten that part.
Btw, Innovation is…
I should clarify that when I speak of “innovation” I’m not talking about simply applying technology or existing ideas directly to problem areas that sorely need that specific tech or visionary drive. I’m talking about truly radical approaches to even the most mundane concepts that are truly ahead of their time. I’m talking about Alan Kay walking around with his cardboard prototype of the Dynabook in 1968 (the inspiration for todays tablets and computers), how Netflix started mailing DVDs and eventually took down a Blockbuster rent-a-VHS-tape world, or how students used PieLab, a pop-up pie shop to counter racism and segregation (Future Partners).
Google’s Crazy 8's
Crazy 8’s is one of Google’s core sprint methods. The goal is to sketch 8 distinct ideas in 8 minutes, pushing yourself to go beyond your initial idea and generate a variety of solutions.
Leigh Thompson, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, offered a similar idea to replace brainstorming: “I give everybody in the group index cards or pieces of paper and tell them to write down every idea they have, putting aside all judgment and practicality. At a minimum, I want everybody to write 10 ideas in 10 minutes.”
But what I love about Google’s approach is that they’ve named their exercise Crazy 8’s. These are not just your generic brainstormed concepts. These are wacky and wild and hilarious concepts that can boost the creative energy of the team and increase the number of innovative solutions the team can generate.
Carnegie Mellon’s Chainstorming! Cheatstorming!
At Carnegie Mellon University in 2013, professor Haakon Faste led his HCI students in an experiment to find new methods for online creative idea generation. The class looked at various cognitive systems and created numerous methods, two of which are quite intriguing: Chainstorming and Cheatstorming.
Chainstorming
Inspired by a game called “Chinese whispers,” chainstorming requires each participant to build on the ideas of a previous participant. The first person in the chain generates the prompt question and one or two ideas that respond to the question before sending it off to a network of friends. Each subsequent person sees the prompt question, along with a subset of the ideas from the previous participant, and uses these ideas to build on them and generate new ideas.
Cheatstorming
Once many random ideas (say, 50+) have been generated, participants vote on their favorite ideas and ideate on those to generate more ideas. Because cheatstorming proposes that no new ideas are necessary for further ideation to occur, you need only to take randomly from the previous ideas to advance project progress.
Interested in hearing more? Haakon, currently a professor at CCA, gave a great talk on this at UC San Diego. Totally worth your time!
Future Partner’s Think Wrong Principle
CMU was not collaborating with Future, but around the same time, Future was cooking up a whole design sprint culture and method around thinking “wrong.” What makes a design innovative is its deviation from the status quo. In typical brainstorm activities, too many ideas are discarded prematurely because of constraints. Future looks at constraints and says, “So, our brains conspire against us? Generate ideas randomly.”
How to Think Wrong
The principle is crazy similar to cheatstorming. At the start of a sprint, participants are sent out to observe the environment (ideally outside). After walking around, they write down observations of what they saw or thought during their short adventure (ex: bird poop on a car, an old “No Parking” sign). After picking a few observations at random, participants work in smaller groups to mindmap other related words (ex: bird poop on a car → seagulls → stolen french fries → McDonalds → unhealthy nonfood), and from those mindmaps another group of words is randomly chosen. Participants are given their formal prompt and they start generating concepts and designs using the random words they were given.
I’m probably not doing the concept justice. But accomplished graphic designer and entrepreneur John Bielenberg has an awesome talk and Future recently published their Think Wrong book for your viewing pleasure. Highly recommend!!
In Conclusion, The Crazy Secret is Crazy Thoughts
Google uses Crazy 8’s very frequently while I don’t know how often the CMU HCI program uses chainstorming or cheatstorming. There’s a specific team within Google that handles design sprints while CMU is another university, and Future is a single team unit that acts as more of a consultancy to other larger companies. Furthermore, specific exercises have their uses in specific instances. There should be no pressure to always do something ‘innovative.’ Creating design that’s simply creative and functional is perfectly fine as well (and not always as easy as we make it out to be).
I hope you are as intrigued as I am to see the correlations between my experiences with each separate organization. The fact that there are correlations points to the fact that something is working, and that’s special. I have been extremely fortunate to have been exposed to these three methods of thinking before I complete my last year in CCA’s IxD Program. I believe it’s important to be able to share and articulate my thought process to people who are not exposed to Crazy 8’s, chainstorming, cheatstorming, or thinking wrong––including the people at my future workplace. This is my first attempt.
Some of my peers know with all their being that they want to be part of a startup or a consultancy or a large corporation. I’m not envisioning a specific trajectory for my life. I want to continue to learn and grow as fast as I can and follow the winding paths fueled by my passions and curiosity. But I do believe that wherever I go––and wherever you go––together we can take heart in being random and crazy (though I won’t be putting that in my job description).
