Chapter 9

Combining the Unlikely

The team reassembled slowly. The tension from the first take at brainstorming was quickly becoming a distant memory as the group refocused on the problems they were there to tackle. Kate was sure not to bring the group back to the activity too quickly. Instead, she encouraged small talk. She wanted to get to know her team a little more personally. They had yet to have that time together, so she started to ask some seemingly benign questions, but in truth, she was very interested in their responses.

Over lunch, she learned that Amy had a toddler in preschool. Elaine's kids were in college—one was adrift on the party circuit with no major in sight and the other (engineering major) just got his nose broken playing rugby but was on the mend. Damon was an artist in his spare time but was a bit coy about what kind of art it exactly was, which Kate allowed to slide. Maya was in a relationship with the same man for the past five years and seeming quite happy together with their two cats, a Birman and a Maine Coon. Juan was an avid carpenter on the weekends and in the midst of remodeling his kitchen piece by piece, much to his wife's frustration.

For her part, Kate revealed that her kids were in high school and her husband, Luke was a marine botanist who explored the muck in all of its corners, from the Everglades to the Galapagos. Luckily they didn't ask her about global warming. She spared them Luke's speech about global warming shrinking oxygen in large sections of the earth's seas, creating dead zones at near-crisis levels. The algae were loving it—the Dungeness crabs not so much. Another example of how crisis can be good for some and not for others.

Once everyone was finished and the lunch debris cleared away, they went back to task relaxed and revived. Kate reminded everyone of the guidelines for brainstorming and they went back to their sticky notes. Between the prelunch brainstorm and the current one, the team depleted their supply of ideas in short order. Within about ten minutes, they had generated over one hundred new ideas. Some were wild, some were not, and some were a combination of ideas already presented. Just as the ideas seemed to be exhausted, there was a knock at the door of the conference room. Tony poked his head in.

“Hey, everyone, how are things . . .” his voice trailed off as he noticed the incredible amount of flip chart paper, writing, and sticky notes covering the room for the first time. He smiled, “Hmmm, looks like we got some brainstorming happening here! All right. Nice. Good to see.”

“Want to take a look and see what you think so far?” asked Kate.

Kate noticed that Juan and Elaine both seemed a little surprised by her invitation as they shifted in their seats and looked down at their own papers. She realized that it wasn't customary in their firm to share their work openly before it was complete. The others seemed to just take it in stride, caught up in the flow of the day.

Tony perused their work as if he was had just entered an art exhibit. He was first attracted to the mind map. Juan decided to take it upon himself to explain their thinking. Tony would only reply with “Yes, yes, I see. Uh-huh. Interesting.”

Then he moved to the wall with their key questions. Damon mentioned they had a lot more and pointed to a pile of flip chart paper filed with questions resting in the corner of the room. “Yes, good,” said Tony.

“And these are your ideas so far?” Tony asked.

“Yes. I think that's all of them.” Elaine said.

Some of her team noticed again how quickly Elaine liked to put a lid on diverging—even hypothetical diverging—but no one said anything.

“You mean you're done? Looks to me like you're just getting started,” pronounced Tony. “Whose handwriting is this? It's all over the place,” he said, pulling a sticky note off a chart and showing it to the group.

“That's mine,” Damon said.

“I might have guessed, Damon. You've always been one of our best idea guys.”

“He's the most creative, that's for sure.” Elaine said.

“Really? I doubt that's true. He's the most prolific, for sure. But I bet if I looked at the innovative ideas up here, I'd find plenty from you, too, Elaine.”

Elaine shook her head. “No, I'm not all that creative. I can put a plan together and get it done better than anyone but I wouldn't say I'm necessarily creative.”

“Really? I bet I know a way to get your creativity flowing and to get you to think about some more ideas. Give me second; I'll be right back.” And with that he left the conference room and headed to his office. In a few minutes he returned with a bag from a toy store.

“I was just at the toy store across the street. I had to pick up some stuff for my grandkid's fifth birthday and after this I can write it off as a business expense,” he said, smiling.

Confused but curious, the team gathered around Tony as he reached into his bag like Santa on Christmas Day. He pulled out a small, kid-sized basketball, which he flipped to Elaine. Then he pulled out a Rubik's cube. He flipped that to Maya. Last, he pulled out a box of multicolored pipe cleaners.

“These are awesome. You can make anything out of pipe cleaners,” Tony said, his face glowing with a child's enthusiasm. He held one up for everyone to see. “OK. Ready to play along? Ready to force yourself to think a bit differently?”

The team nodded in agreement, so he continued, “Kate, would you mind scribing please?”

“Sure thing,” she said, jumping up and grabbing a blue flip chart marker.

“What can you all tell me about these pipe cleaners?” Tony asked, passing the pipe cleaner container around the room.

“They're flexible.”

“They've got lots of colors.”

“They're long.”

“They're thin.”

“You can twist ’em into different shapes.”

“You can tie them together.”

“They can fit into tight spaces.”

“They are made of wire.”

“They're furry.”

“Good, good,” said Tony. “That's fine. I bet we could come up with some more, but that's a good start. Now let's take one of your descriptors. Amy, pick one.”

“You can twist them,” she said, picking one of her own.

“Fine. Twist ‘em. Think about twisting these pipe cleaners.” He took some out and gave a few to each person on the team. “What ideas for ‘How might we build alliances in the marketplace?’ can you get from twisting?”

“How about finding ways to get multiple pipelines to flow together?” said Damon.

“Get different suppliers to Consolidated to work together to serve them better?” added Maya.

“Partner up with the most flexible competitor,” added Amy.

“Build a redundant supply chain,” added Juan.

And so the team was producing more ideas, even though they had thought they were done when Tony arrived. With every toy more ideas came.

Some ideas spurred on from the basketball:

From the Rubik's cube:

Tony was clearly having fun and two more flip charts were soon filled with new ideas. “It's not so hard to push for more ideas when you force your mind to make some connections.”

“I love this game. Let's do more,” Damon said excitedly.

Elaine couldn't help herself. “No, please, don't we have enough?”

“After filling up five flip charts with about sixty ideas on each sheet, I would hope we have enough,” Juan said wearily.

“There are several themes I see coming out—there are ideas around our competitors, some around suppliers, some around customers,” noticed Amy.

Kate saw the team was already moving to the convergent phase. “Tony, that was great. Thanks for doing that. It sounds like the group is seeing a lot of potential in all these ideas. Maybe we should let them move on and do some critical thinking about them.”

“Thanks for indulging me, guys. I remember reading somewhere that the most original ideas generally come at the end of a brainstorming session, after you have pushed yourselves to go beyond the typical brain dump, you know, the ideas you've already thought of that aren't that new. And that's just what you've done. I had fun and I think you've got some very innovative strategies up here. If you select and develop a few of these, I think Alicia will be really pleased.”

“Thanks, Tony.” The team was grateful and a little relieved to be getting some positive feedback from the boss on their new approach. Kate was impressed that Tony made no judgments about the group's work. He just went with the flow and let the group continue on its path. Not many leaders at his level would show a group so much trust, she thought.

“Just one thing I'd like you to keep in mind as you move forward. As you begin to select the ideas that have the most potential for our client, don't lose the novelty. Just because it sounds a little crazy or unlikely to work doesn't mean everything about it should be completely dismissed.” Tony looked each member of the team in the eye as if to make sure they understood that this was a challenge to each of them personally. “And with that, I will take my leave. Great working with you all.” The team helped him gather his grandson's toys before he left the room.

“Looks like I'll need more pipe cleaners,” Tony said to himself as he closed the door behind him.

Kate turned to the group. “Let's take another break. It's getting kind of late, so if you need to check your e-mail or catch up on things, now is a good time to do it. How about we meet back here in an hour?” Then she followed Tony down the hall to his office.