Page 216 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

Storming the Brain 207

Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy coaches and I see so many poor excuses for
brainstorming techniques, it’s no wonder there’s a rolling brownout of
creativity in business today.

7

GREAT MINDS don’t THINK ALIKE

In 1998, I was leading a brainstorming session for Sears in one of its
major foreign markets. We were trying to come up with a “millennium
idea”—you know, a big PR, community-serving concept that would be
executed within the millennium context.
We had 35 people from the Sears marketing team and a few dozen
assorted dummies assembled for brainstorming. (Maybe I need to
explain this a bit more. We held the session in a very cool environment
for brainstorming, a retail display warehouse with, among other
things, over a hundred mannequins. Sorry if I misled you.)
We arranged our 35 people in groups of 5 in various corners of a
large room. One of our ground rules was that if more than one group
came up with an idea, it was immediately thrown out.
People often use duplication as validation of brilliance. “Great
minds think alike.” But the truth is that great minds have different ideas.
The great unwashed masses are the ones who think alike.
If the Sears millennium team found duplication with only 35 peo-
ple, weren’t the chances high that the idea would be developed by their
competition?
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We see too many people in the room. We see too few people in the
room. We see processes that are billed as creative thinking sessions that
look more like Nazi Youth Camps. We see methods that are better suited
to tarring and feathering new ideas than discovering and nurturing
them. We see dominant managers organizing groups under the guise of
brainstorming, meetings that are nothing more than manipulation ses-
sions to get the whole group to agree with the leader’s preconceptions.
Brainstorming is a process with a lot of faces, and I must tell you
that most of them are as ugly as a maggot under a microscope.
To someone like me, a person who eats, breathes, sings, and yodels
creative thinking, going into these types of environments is like
Mother Teresa walking into a bordello on News Year’s Eve. Then