Hack #8: Find Your Solutions Fast
Next time you’re stuck in a lifeless brainstorming session, use these 5 tactics to inject urgency and accelerate your thinking.
Welcome to the 8th post in our #Hacks series where we provide you with all the tools you need to solve your most stubborn challenges in 2 hours (or less).
We’ve all been in those dreaded brainstorming sessions where we’re supposed to come up with creative solutions to those persistent problems. The painful truth is that those sessions generally suck. They’re usually scheduled when the team has given up hope, when nobody really cares any more, when fatigue is palpable. What do you in those situations? You have to shift the dynamic by creating a sense of urgency. Here are 5 tactics you can use to ramp up urgency and find your solutions fast.
1. Schedule Soon
There’s nothing worse than walking into a meeting that has been scheduled for weeks and being told how urgent everything is. Urgency is relative. If you have an urgent matter to solve, the total timeline matters, not just the meeting itself. If you want people to walk into your meeting with a sense of urgency, never invite them more than two days in advance.
2. Start the Clock
Urgency is essentially a shortage of time. Countdown timers accentuate that urgency by visually demonstrating the cost of inaction.
You’ll see a dramatic increase in intensity if you have a countdown timer clearly on display during your next session. It feels like a ticking time bomb, ready to explode if you don’t find a solution.
I’m sure many of you are reading this post faster simply because you see a countdown timer — time is clearly running out.
To crank up the intensity even further, use a red clock. Advertisers have long used the color red to create a sense of urgency with consumers. Red has proven to physically stimulate the body, raising blood pressure and heart rate — exactly what’s needed to breathe passion and urgency into your meeting.
3. Make it Personal
It’s impossible to create a sense of urgency if people just don’t care or just don’t care enough. This issue often becomes more acute as organizations grow as size dilutes the problem across more employees and departments. You need people who are personally motivated to solve those stubborn challenges that stand between you and your mission.
Before your next problem solving session think long and hard about which people have a personal interest in solving the problem and invite those people only. Then, at the start of the session ask everyone in the room their personal cost of failing to find a solution. If they can’t give you an answer, ask them to leave the room. This is not a spectator sport.
4. Fire up the Fear Factor
When we think of problem solving and innovation, our minds think of the benefits. Unfortunately, this isn’t how motivation works. Study after study has proven that we are more motivated by things we could lose rather than things we can gain. To create a sense of urgency you must focus on the negative not the positive.
The psychology of loss aversion has been used in sales to create demand for products and services for years. The exact same techniques can be applied here to create demand for your solutions. At the start of the session ask simple questions like “What happens if we fail to find a solution?” If the answer is “We would need to cut down staff?”, ramp up fear by asking follow on questions like “How many jobs would we lose?” The more acute failure feels, the more urgency you’ll create in your meeting.
5. Crank up the Competition
Think about the last time you were involved in a brainstorming session, the chances are that the meeting was attended by a single team working together to find solutions. When was the last time you saw different teams competing to find a solution within your organization? It’s almost non-existent, right?
It’s funny, we’re always touting the efficiency gains of external competition, but what about internal competition? The next time you need to increase urgency in a problem solving session, split the team into teams. Sure, there’s some redundancy, but it’s worth it to find your solutions faster. You’ll be amazed what a little competition can do to light a fire under people.
Wrapping Up
There’s no need to suffer through any more lifeless brainstorming sessions. Next time, use these 5 simple techniques to create a sense of urgency and accelerate your thinking. You’re closer to your solution than you think.
