Today, as the very last meeting in 2019 of our Future Reality Lab, we held a brainstorming session. I led the group in front of a large whiteboard, and people tossed out ideas.
The goal was to figure out what our direction and focus should be in 2020. The goal was to work at a high level, rather than worrying the details.
I told them “Don’t think of this as something you do over coffee. Think of this as something you do over beer.” Although I suppose, having said that, I probably should have served beer. 🙂
My job was largely to keep things on a level of “yes, and” rather than “yet, but”. We didn’t consider any ideas to be bad ideas — they all went up on the whiteboard.
Yet everyone could tell when somebody came up with an idea that was particularly good. You could feel the energy in the room rising at those moments.
I decided to mentally bookmark those particular ideas to myself, so we could go back to them later, rather than calling them out on the whiteboard. After all, we didn’t want it to be a competition. You never know what is going to be the next great idea.
So now we have lots of raw material to work with. The hard part is going to be putting them into action.
Oh well. As a friend of mine once said about good ideas: “Conception is always easier than delivery.”