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Creativity

Breakthrough
from Inside the Thinking
Box
by Kevin Coyne, Patricia Gorman Clifford, and Renée Dye
From the Magazine (December 2007)

Summary.   Reprint: R0712E Companies often begin their search for great ideas either by
encouraging wild, outside-the-box thinking or by conducting quantitative analysis of existing
market and financial data and customer opinions. Those approaches can produce... more

 Imagine that we asked you to invent an idea for a new business in the
Tweet next 20 minutes. The task is so broad and vague that you would probably
 think you couldn’t do it. We have often seen people give up without
Post really trying when confronted with such an amorphous challenge.

Share Instead, let us pose a narrower question: What do Rollerblades, Häagen-
Dazs ice cream, and Spider-Man movies have in common? The answer is
 they are all based on the same business concept. In each case, a firm has
Save
taken something children love and reproduced it in an extreme, more
 expensive form for adults. The same notion has led to over 25 new
Buy Copies
product categories, including gourmet jelly beans, baseball fantasy
 camps, $200 sneakers, 20-foot-high sand castles for corporate parties,
Print paintball, space tourism, and Disney collectibles. Now that you see this,
we are confident you could think of how to reproduce something that
was emotionally powerful to you as a child in an expensive form for
adults. That’s because we have conducted this exercise as a warm-up to
our workshops with hundreds of managers, and they have always
generated interesting ideas.

 PLAY 9:12

What did we just do, and why did it work? In our quest for breakthrough
ideas, we didn’t ask you to think outside the box. Nor did we ask you to
think more intently inside your usual box. We gave you a new box and
asked you to think inside that.

Most managers and professionals are quite capable of thinking

effectively inside a box. They live with constraints all the time and
automatically explore alternatives, combinations, and permutations
within their confined space. We have found that if you systematically
constrain the scope of their thinking (but not too much), people are
adept at fully exploring the possibilities, and they can regularly generate
lots of good ideas—and occasionally some great ones. Setting the right
constraints is a matter of asking the right kinds of questions: ones that
create boxes that are useful, but different, from the boxes your people
currently think in.

Ten years ago, as part of a larger project for McKinsey’s strategy practice,
we led a team of consultants who developed such an approach to
brainstorming. It involves posing concrete questions and orchestrating
the process for answering those questions. Since then we have
successfully used this method with more than 150 clients engaged in
everything from major product innovations and industry-shaping moves
to simple process improvements. Our technique helped a consumer
goods company identify an opportunity for a chilled beverage that
captured 20% of the market in the first six months after its launch. A
print media company used it to come up with ways to triple the firm’s
penetration of the Hispanic market. A plastic pipe manufacturer
uncovered an immediately exploitable opportunity to reduce costs by
75%. A regional bank came up with a process that more than doubled the
sales productivity of the branches involved in the pilot. Even those
whose job it is to be creative have benefited from the methodology: The
editors of a group of prominent magazines who had been stuck in a rut
in their efforts to come up with story angles have begun using the
approach to develop fresh new articles for every issue.

Now that it has been road tested, we’d like to share our approach. A good
place to begin is to examine what’s wrong with conventional approaches
to brainstorming.
Why Brainstorming Doesn’t Work
Many managers fail to generate a stream of solid ideas because they
employ two common techniques: They encourage their people to go wild
and think outside the box or they assign them the task of slicing and
dicing the old boxes (in the form of existing market and financial data or
specially commissioned market research) in new ways.

The problem with the first method is that most people are not very good
at unstructured, abstract brainstorming. Imagine a random product you
are trying to improve in a typical facilitated brainstorming session.
Outside-the-box possibilities could include making the product bigger or
smaller, lighter or heavier, prettier or more rugged (or changing its
appearance in any of a hundred ways). Further ideas could involve
making the product more expensive or less, or maybe breaking it into
parts or bundling it with other products. They could involve changing
the product’s functionality, durability, ease of use, or the way it fits with
other products. Or its availability, affordability, or repairability. How do
you know which dimensions are fruitful to explore? More often than not,
the facilitator will say, “There are no bad ideas,” which only compounds
the confusion. Without some guidance, people cannot judge whether
they should continue in the direction of their first notion or change
course altogether. They cannot handle the uncertainty, and they shut
down.

The second method—slicing the data in new ways—almost always

produces only small to middling insights, for different reasons. The
contents of every database are structured to correspond to insights that
are already recognized, not ones that aren’t. (Why are sales data often
organized by region? Because someone already knows that the contrasts
from region to region are meaningful.) Moreover, any insights produced
by recrunching publicly available numbers will probably be discovered
quickly by competitors’ armies of MBAs, who are most likely using the
same techniques and the same data as your people.

Market research suffers from another sort of limitation. Whenever an

organization embarks on a journey to come up with a big, new idea,
someone inevitably declares, “We should ask the customer, because
customers aren’t stupid, you know.” True, customers aren’t stupid, and
they can tell you if they perceive your product to be inferior to
competitors’ offerings in some particular way. However, they can rarely
tell you whether they need or want a product that they have never seen
or imagined. Market surveys famously said the ultimate demand for
computers was five units. That people didn’t need Xeroxes because they
would never need more than three copies of anything and carbon paper
could handle it. That cellular phone demand was limited. That the Sony
Walkman would be a flop. Market research can be invaluable in getting
reactions to an idea once it is fully formed and tangibly demonstrated to
the customer. It rarely, however, finds the latent need.

Our approach takes a middle path between the two extremes of

boundless speculation and quantitative data analysis. When you ask
questions that create new boxes to think inside, you can prevent people
from getting lost in the cosmos and give them a basis for making and
comparing choices and for knowing whether they’re making progress.
But posing the right questions is only half the battle. How you organize
and conduct brainstorming sessions also matters enormously. You must
redesign your ideation processes so that they remove obstacles that
interfere with the flow of ideas—such as most people’s aversion to
speaking in groups of more than ten. We’ll talk about the process of
structuring an effective brainstorming session in a moment. But first,
let’s examine more closely where great questions come from.
Asking the Right Questions
In conducting its research ten years ago, the McKinsey team learned of a
study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, then a psychology professor at the
University of Chicago. In its descriptions of how Nobel laureates and
other creative people achieved their breakthroughs, an interesting
insight emerged: Once they asked themselves the right question, their
ideas flowed rapidly. This revelation prompted us to examine how the
most successful companies in recent history had achieved their
positions. We looked at two groups: The first were already large
companies that became industry-shaping enterprises in a relatively short
time. The second grew from garage-based start-ups into firms with more
than $1 billion in (profitable) sales in less than six years. In every case,
their successes were built on breakthrough ideas that redefined the
products and services in their markets.

We found that a number of their innovations sprang from responses to

particular questions. But, subsequently, we realized that it didn’t matter
whether they had actually asked a question or not. What mattered was
whether there was a question that could have uncovered the kind of
extraordinary opportunities that CNN, Google, USA Today, eBay, and
Amazon identified and exploited.

We then zeroed in on 50 breakthrough ideas from a spectrum of

industries and reverse engineered them to find the focused questions
that could have led any intelligent manager to the same epiphany.
Obviously, some of the questions were specific to their industries.
However, we found many that are universally applicable, including those
featured in the exhibit “21 Great Questions for Developing New
Products.”

One question that can generate

21 Great Questions for insights in any business is, “What is
Developing New Products the biggest hassle about using or
“De-average” buyers and users buying our product or service that
Which customers use or people unnecessarily tolerate without
purchase our product in the knowing it?” Entrepreneurs who
most unusual way? Do any ... focused on eliminating such hassles
gave us Jiffy Lube (on demand, fast
 turnaround oil changes), CarMax
(used cars with warranties purchased
in a pleasant environment at
reasonable, fixed prices), prepaid cell phones that can be bought off-the-
shelf (thus avoiding the 20-minute setup process and the risk of racking
up unexpectedly high phone bills), and something as low-tech as single-
use packages of real fire logs (for those who have no place to store a cord
of wood).

The world is still full of such opportunities. Take gasoline retailing.

What’s the biggest “invisible” hassle? Having to go to a gas station. The
average car is driven only about 500 hours a year and sits somewhere—
often in a large parking lot—for the remaining 95% of the time. What if a
small tanker truck could visit that parking lot and fill up any subscriber’s
vehicle displaying a “please fill this car” flag? Would it work?
Operational issues would have to be overcome, of course. But just ask
any motorist pumping gas at a self-service station on a cold, rainy day
how he or she likes the idea.

The same questions can, of course, lead to different ideas. Consider the
opportunities that different divisions of a bank might generate by
pondering the question, “For which subset of users are the procedures
associated with our product least suited?” This exercise could prompt
the lending department to focus on marginally profitable loans to small
businesses for which the paperwork is burdensome to both sides. One
possible remedy the bank might offer: industrial pawn shops, which, like
their consumer counterparts, would allow a business to secure a loan by
parking an asset in exchange, minimizing the need for documentation.
The same question could spark the bank’s credit card division to think
about which potential customers might not be well represented in the
credit-history databases owned by external credit bureaus. This line of
questioning could lead to a business initiative aimed at marketing credit
cards to immigrants who have good credit histories in their home
countries but no credit history in the United States. Similarly, asking,
“Who does not use my product for one particular reason?” has already
led to the creation of several museums for the blind, where information
is delivered through aural, tactile, and olfactory sensations.

The most fertile questions focus the mind on a subset of possibilities that
differ markedly from those explored before, guiding people to valuable
overlooked corners of the universe of possible improvements. To develop
your own list, ask yourself every time you come across a new business
idea that you think is really clever, “What question would have caused
me to see this opportunity first?” In other words, reverse engineer every
great idea or innovation you see. That’s what we did to invent the
question about the ice cream, Rollerblades, and Spider-Man that we use
in our warm-up exercise. Using this approach, we have built and tested
an arsenal of more than 250 questions.

The most fertile questions focus

the mind on valuable overlooked
corners of the universe of possible
improvements.

Should you want to be more systematic about the search for new
questions, you can employ a simple logic tree that starts with a high-
level question and successively breaks it down into more tightly defined
probes. This rigor has proven useful even in unusual settings. For
example, imagine you are the editor of a trendy mass-market magazine
that covers popular music. Your articles consist mainly of interviews
with and profiles of new bands, singers, and occasionally a venerable
star. But the formula is getting tired. A simple tool like the exhibit “A
Music Magazine’s Logic Tree for Generating Fresh Article Ideas” could
assist you in pursuing a much wider range of story angles on the same
trends and keep readers engaged.

We have found that the right level of

A Music Magazine’s Logic abstraction tends to occur about
Tree for Generating Fresh three to six levels down the tree. If
Article Ideas
you stop at the first level, the
question would be too broad; if you
were to continue too far down, the
questions would start becoming too
specific to generate useful answers.
In addition to aiding you in coming
up with novel ideas, such trees can
also help you see when you are stuck
One tool for systematically in a rut and are producing
generating effective conceptually similar ideas. If all your
brainstorming questions is a ideas originate from the same few
logic tree. It begins with a ... questions, you’ll profit substantially
from exploring the other branches of
 the tree.

Process Better Orchestrating the

The fact is, virtually all brainstorming sessions violate the fundamentals
of how human beings actually think and work together. Consider the
following all-too-familiar situation.

About 20 people—most of them chosen for political reasons—gather in a

room. The leader is either their boss, whose presence makes some people
reluctant to offer what may be perceived as a silly idea, or a “creativity
moderator,” who neither understands the business nor thinks he should
have to. Three pushy people dominate the session with their pet ideas,
while the others sit in silence. After the group is instructed to think
outside the box, ideas pop up randomly: “Let’s paint it blue!” “We can
sell it in Germany.” “How about an upscale version?” “The problem is the
sales force.” Since “there are no bad ideas,” preposterous dreams
consume much of the time and energy. (“If we could invent a cheap pill
that could substitute for gasoline….”) Finally, because everyone knows
you cannot force people to come up with good ideas, participants think
it’s okay to produce nothing—or to not follow up on anything the
workshop did create.

Now let’s adjust the process, aligning each step with what we know
about how people work best in groups:

Bound the range of acceptable ideas, then select and tailor the
questions accordingly.
How often have you heard someone say after a brainstorming session, “I
had thought of that but didn’t say it because I didn’t think it was the kind
of idea you were looking for”? How often have you been presented with
ideas that were patently infeasible given your budget, staffing, or time
constraints? How often have people offered up incremental steps when
you were looking for a big idea? All of these problems are easily avoided
if you take the time, before the meeting, to clarify what constitutes the
criteria for, and boundaries of, a good idea in your particular case. Do
you want big ideas or safe, surefire winners? How much money can the
company afford to spend? What level of staffing is the company willing
to commit? How soon do you need a payback?
Then consider the particular requirements of the problem you’re trying
to solve. That will help you avoid asking questions that will lead to the
same insight. For example, if all customers can use your product in only
one way (like large cranes used inside industrial plants), it doesn’t pay to
ask, “For which current customers are our products least suited?” and
also, “For what particular usage occasions is our product least suited?”
since in this case, those questions will result in the same answer.
However, those two questions might produce excellent and distinct
insights in situations where each customer uses the product in several
ways and the customers are themselves quite different from one another
(which is the case for automobiles, for example). When choosing among
possible questions, go for those that approach the problem from angles
that are as far as possible from the ways you have approached it in the
past. As a whole, think of the series of questions as a portfolio, each one
creating a distinct box that comes at your situation from a different point
of view.

Once you’ve settled these parameters, you will be able to tailor the
language of your questions to best fit your specific goals and constraints.
The wording of questions that will generate radical ideas differs
substantially from that which will generate moderate, low-risk ideas. On
the one hand, for example, a leader of a computer vendor who asked his
senior managers in the late 1980s, “How can I reduce costs?” would
probably have elicited solid but incremental ideas like “consolidate
shipments” or “reduce store staffing.” On the other hand, asking them,
“What element of our business would we have to eliminate to cut costs
50%, and are there customers who do not need that element?” could
have led the vendor to beat Michael Dell in pioneering the mail-order
distribution model that so successfully challenged the retail store
approach to selling personal computers.

The number of questions in your portfolio will depend on the size of

your brainstorming group and the time available. For reasons that will
become obvious below, you will need one question for every four or five
participants every 30 minutes. However, you might consider giving your
best question or two to more than one group if you can’t think of enough
excellent questions to go around. Finally, test each question on yourself.
Which ones make you think of the most ideas?

Select participants who can produce original insights.

Sure, you always have to invite some people for political reasons who
will not contribute much. But make sure there are enough other people
who can contribute. If, for instance, you intend to ask, “Who is using
our product in ways we did not expect or intend?” or “Who is using our
product in enormous amounts?” you should plan to include participants
who are in a position to know firsthand. There’s a very good chance
these people will not be on your own staff and may be found in
unexpected places. For example, the surprising potential for a line of
foods aimed at elderly consumers was discovered a number of years ago
by a sales manager who found that one of his reps in Florida sold much
more baby food than his territory’s demographics suggested should be
possible. Eventually, the salesman revealed his secret: People in nursing
homes were eating the baby food. Similarly, mountain bikes were the
result of bicycle manufacturers learning about a subset of customers
who, having subjected their bikes to extreme abuse, kept replacing them
very frequently.
Ensure that everyone is fully engaged.
You must accept that under normal brainstorming circumstances most
of your attendees will care less about the success of the meeting than you
do. Therefore, don’t be shy about resorting to parlor tricks. We once had
the top six executives of a $100 billion company working full tilt because
each had bet $20 that his team could come up with the best idea. If a
small trick could inspire those multimillionaires, imagine what you
could do with your participants. Perhaps you could let the winning team
pick the color of the logo on the final product or appear as extras in a
television ad. Whatever the incentive, its purpose is clear: getting 100%
of the participants to work at 100% of their capacity 100% of the session.

We once had the top six executives

of a $100 billion company working
full tilt because each had bet $20
that his team could come up with
the best idea.

Structure the meeting to ensure social norms work for you, not
against you.
In almost all meetings of ten or more people, the social norm is to keep
quiet or to speak only a minimum amount. A few pushy people break this
rule, and the others let them fill the airtime. In contrast, observe what
happens when a manager breaks a 20-person session into groups of
four. First, in any group of four, the social norm is for everyone to
participate, so no one can hide without seeming uncooperative. Second,
if there are five subgroups instead of one combined group, five people
rather than just one are offering their ideas at any given time. Finally,
put all those pushy people who feel compelled to dominate the
discussion in the same group. That will prevent them from silencing the
16 people in the other groups.

Put all those pushy people who feel

compelled to dominate the
discussion in the same group. That
will prevent them from silencing
the 16 people in the other groups.

Focus every discussion using your preselected questions.

At the outset of the meeting, explicitly state the ground rules you’ve
decided on—whether you want big ideas or incremental improvements,
what the budget is, and so on. Don’t worry about stifling creativity. It is
precisely such boundaries—the outline of your new box—that will
channel their creativity.
Then, once you’ve divided people up into their small groups, give each a
single highly focused task. Have them spend 20 to 30 minutes discussing
one question and report back to everyone the best ideas that came from
just that question. Here’s what typically happens: The first five minutes
of each session sound like any other brainstorming meeting. But then
the participants return to the better ideas and refine them. Thoughtful
variants emerge. The interplay results in complex, multilayered notions
that have a higher likelihood of growing into a true killer idea.

Do not rely solely on one brainstorming session.

It is surprising how many managers limit the participation of others in
their ideation effort to one workshop. That, again, ignores how people
actually think and work together. Some individuals don’t work well in a
workshop format, no matter how well structured the session is. What’s
more, the legitimate answer to some questions is “I don’t know, but we
could find out if this workshop weren’t ending at 5:00.” And sometimes
the ideas keep improving over time. For all these reasons, brainstorming
should be a multifaceted process, not a single event. You might, for
instance, assign someone before the workshop to gather data; you might
need to schedule a follow-up meeting or two; or you might just need to
provide a way to gather additional information from individuals after the
session.
Narrow the list of ideas to the ones you will seriously investigate
right away.
Nothing is more deflating to the participants of a brainstorming session
than leaving at the end with no confidence that anything will happen as
a result of their efforts. So don’t push off the task of sorting the ideas to
later. Do it right then and there. For most ideation sessions, the selection
process does not have to be complex. If you wait until some later point
to sort the ideas, the odds are overwhelming that nothing will come
from the effort.

Don’t push off the task of sorting

the ideas to later. Do it right then
and there.
From HBR Store
In sharp contrast to traditional brainstorming, our process typically
generates a surfeit of constructive ideas. A 20-person workshop
produces about 20 ideas an hour, on average. Thus, the eight hours of
idea generation that normally occurs in a two-day workshop generates HBR Guide to Project
Management Ebook + Tools
more than 150 ideas! True, usually about a quarter are awful, and only Press Book
about half of the others will be worthy of serious consideration. $79.95
However, that still leaves some 50 ideas to choose from. Many managers
View Details
are reluctant to pick winners out of fear of disappointing those whose
ideas are not selected. This is a mistake. Most people prefer the choice to
be made in front of them so they can learn from your thought process
and produce better ideas next time.• • •

When you introduce our think-inside-the-box approach in your

organization, keep in mind one other basic law of human dynamics:
People are nervous about change. It could take time and effort to coax all Sales Management That
Works: How to Sell in a
those quiet, thoughtful souls who have hated traditional brainstorming World that Never Stops
sessions dominated by blowhards to emerge from the shadows and open Press Book
up. They may come mentally unprepared to participate the first time and $32.00
may not have done their homework. After all, they never had to be on View Details
their toes before in quite this way. However, most, if not all, of them
eventually will see and appreciate the change. Within the safe confines of
new boxes, they will shower you with good, and great, ideas. Then it will Read more on Creativity or
related topics Product
be your job to turn those ideas into profitable reality. development and Business
processes
A version of this article appeared in the December 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review.

KC
PC Patricia Gorman Clifford
(trish_clifford@mckinsey.com) is a senior
strategy expert in McKinsey’s office in
Stamford, Connecticut.

RD Renée Dye (renee_dye@mckinsey.com) is a

senior consultant in the firm’s strategy practice
and is based in Atlanta.

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