33voices interviews Kevin, Shawn Coyne
Kevin and Shawn Coyne: Come up with the right question
This is Moe Abdou. I’m thrilled today to be with the Kevin and Shawn Coyne. Both very cool world class consultants and co-authors of a very, very intriguing new book called Brainsteering. Guys welcome.
Shawn, let’s dive into the book. My first question about that is when did you guys first learn that there was a more effective way to brainstorming? I have to tell you, coming from the environment of financial services for 25 plus years, we didn’t sit around and brainstorm a lot of creative ideas. I had to figure out how to do it on my own. But it was always exciting for me knowing I’m going into a brainstorming session. After reading yourbook, my mental model has shifted dramatically.
It’s funny, I think a lot of people had that same experience where it sounds like a brainstorming session will be something fun to do but their experience when they actually go through them can be very frustrating a lot of times.
As we outlined in the book based on what hundreds of people have told us with their experience over the years, the typical issue when people go into a brainstorming session is that it tends to be sort of an intellectual free for all where it tends to be relatively unfocused in terms of what the goals are. Certainly, relatively unfocused in terms of the way the process works. A lot of times,
people come out of that, you know, four hours in the conference room feeling that their time has been wasted.
The goal that we had in creating the Brainsteering process was to find a way to help people come up with ideas that were much more consistently good ideas and do it much more efficiently by bringing just a little bit of structure to the process, to help focus all that creative energy.