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Braydon McCormick

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A platform for collaborative ideation

A method and tool for reducing errors in judgement and noise in collaboration
Braydon McCormick

Issues with brainstorming

You’re tasked with generating an idea or solution, or you need to evaluate a concept and come up with an opinion. Getting to a balanced, accurate assessment and selection of an idea is really challenging and fraught with errors - individually or as a group. The concept of “errors in judgement” and bias in decision making has been widely researched across psychology and are well known issues.
Consider some basic challenges when ideating or making “rational” choices:
More opinions than people: Everyone has an opinion, and sometimes more than one. How do you select the “Correct” opinion when they all may be equally valid? Often we may rely on the “most senior person”, but what if the most junior is actually correct?
Loudest voice wins: We’ve all experiences when a group of people is in a room and someone feels particularly passionate about an opinion and they are quite vocal. It’s often hard to ignore that opinion - even if it skews the decision in the opposite direction. And that skewing is hardly unbiased.
Going with your “gut”: Let’s say you are an innovative Cardiac sureon being asked to evaluate marketing language for a new 3D viewing capability during surgery. Your gut is “excellent, this is the wave of the future”, and you suggest “Wave of the future” as the key message. However, most cardiac surgeons respond better to “Safe and effective, reduces mistakes.”
“It’s hot outside” effect: Judges in court rooms tend to give harsher sentences when it’s hot outside. Does this decision making trend sound error free? The same could be said for post-lunch malaise, or end of day “over the wall”. In all cases, the judgement are affected by factors external to the decision at hand.

Reducing the noise

These kinds of errors in judgement are referred to as Noise. So - the question is - how - as a group or individually - do we reduce errors in Judgement - quieting the Noise?

Philosophy of reducing noice

Based on the work of Daniel Khaneman, I’ve created a methodology and associated tool that helps facilitate the reduction of noise in the ideation and idea evaluation process. Fundamentally, it relies on several key concepts:
“Yes, And?”: When ideating, we often fall prey to “it won’t work.” In the ideation phase, it’s better to be additive to anything. Let’s say you have an idea for a new one-handed can-opener. Ask “yes, and - what else does it need, or can it do” - generate as many ideas around it as possible.
“Sleep on it”: Rather than immediately diagnose problems with an idea, or reduce to it’s smallest form, or make a decision on what is the best idea, sleep on it. It could be going out to lunch, or the next day or the next week. Just wait to make a decision. Use an asynchronous process to slow down reaction time and the emotions associated with an opinion.
Anonymous group evaluation: Once ideas have been reduced to actionable units, take the personality out of a decision and use group anonymous voting to get to a more balanced decision.

Example environment

The link below is for a persistent structured brainstorming environment for a product we rolled out to large Pharma. I built this process and environment from some standard brainstorming processes used throughout consulting. Comments and branding have been removed for confidentiality purposes and commenting and editing have been disabled, but I believe it’s a reasonable representation of one of the more structured ways I go about setting up teams for repeatable and consistent ideation (although there are others as well). A version of this environment is currently applied to major Pharma brand ideation sessions with HCPs.
For the purposes of this assessment, there are a few things that are missing, and would need to be fleshed out more:
Process embedded in the system for self-identifying how we improve as a team - and how we measure whether we’re getting better (even if it’s subjective).
Process for reward allocation to increase incentive for participation.
Links to check-in meetings and notes from check in meetings.
Methods for planning resource needs (eg: how many more development hours would this take) and checking if those needs are realistic (although this is a bit a part of phase 2).

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Click to visit the Ideation Environment
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Issues with brainstorming
Reducing the noise
Philosophy of reducing noice
Example environment
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