Speaker 1: And we're mostly focusing on communication and meetings, because that's a big part of being a leader, is communicating things to the team, having productive meetings. And a lot of people, when they think of the word brainstorm, they don't always get super excited. It can feel kind of cheesy, and you picture, you know, a guy at the whiteboard. Why are brainstorms frequently not productive and boring?

Speaker 2: Well, I knew that this was the topic that you wanted to talk about, and I was very excited to do it. Not because I'm an advocate of brainstorms per se, which are kind of, you know, chaotic, unbridled, not structured discussions about anything that happens to come into your mind, hence the word brainstorm. So I hate to break it to you, but brainstorming as that is described is not effective. It's not useful for helping people to be more creative, be innovative, be entrepreneurial. And in my teaching, though, I teach a whole variety of approaches that are effective. I know this from my own entrepreneurship experience. I know it from my own teaching experience. I know it because I'm a professor of entrepreneurship at Brown, and everything I teach needs to be grounded in academic research. And I'm happy to share at least a few highlights. And then, as many of my students have been after me, I've written and published a book called C Solves Scale, How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. And in that book, I dive very deeply into a number of these methodologies that I'm happy to at least highlight today with you.

Speaker 1: Oh, that's awesome. Well, we're here for it. So talk to us about the best way to even structure this brainstorm meeting, because like you're talking about, it can just be unbridled chaos, and, you know, the loudest people in the room are usually leading it, and they're throwing all the ideas out there, and there's usually some folks who have some brilliant ideas, but feel like they're stuck in a quiet space because they don't want to try to interrupt and get their voice heard. And so that can be a very stressful environment that isn't productive. What have you found is the best way to actually structure the meeting before it actually happens so that it's productive and fun?

Speaker 2: I'll tell you the secret for what's the most important factor that can lead to a successful outcome in something creative or innovative or entrepreneurial where you're looking to solve a problem. And that's less about the process and much more about who's engaged in the process. And the truth is that the most successful teams tend to be the most diverse and the most inclusive. Diverse writ large. That's race, gender, background, experience, introverts and extroverts, people who are more analytical, people who are more artistic. The more diverse, the better. And part of the team should engage people who are going to be involved in the product or process later on once you've created it. And that's related to an adage that a good friend of mine and collaborator Bob Johnston has coined, which is people support what they help to create. So the most important factor here happens before you're even engaged in any kind of creative process. It's about how you're formulating the team.

Speaker 1: That's a good reminder to start there. So let's say you get the right people in the room, you feel good about this. What's the next step you need to take before you actually jump into sharing ideas?

Speaker 2: I love that question because not only is there a fun answer to that, but there's really good research, academic evidence for how you need to break what we might call mental fixedness. Our brain's being stuck looking at or thinking about or digesting one way. And in order to be creative or problem-solving or innovative or entrepreneurial, you have to free your brain from that fixedness. And I'll give you a quick example. There's a really good research study from two psychologists at Harvard, Langer and Piper. And they did what seems like a pretty simple experiment to demonstrate the shift of mindset and how it can have big impact. They divided groups into two teams. One team was handed a pencil, a piece of paper, and a rubber band. And the instructions were, you're going to do some tasks and you're going to make some mistakes. And they were told, this is a pencil, this is a piece of paper, this is a rubber band. And only 3% of that group figured out that you could use the rubber band as an eraser to erase some of your mistakes. The second group was same scenario. They were told, here's a pencil, here's a piece of paper. And when they were handed the rubber band, the little shift was, and this could be a rubber band. Not this is, this could be. That's all it took to break their fixedness. Because 40% of that group realized that the rubber band could actually be an eraser. And so sometimes it doesn't take much to break your mental fixedness around a table or in a creative group, but you have to take time in the beginning to acknowledge that we're biased and we're probably focused on one way of thinking about a problem. And we need to free ourselves in order to do that. And when I share with you another technique a little later on, I'll emphasize how that can also break your fixedness. But once you have the right people around the table, you have to take a couple minutes to acknowledge we're biased and we can break our bias, break our mental fixedness by being conscious of it.