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Chapter 20: Back to Basics

“Too many people approach creative brainstorming by taking what’s practical into consideration way too early in the process. Working with Jonathan and Dan reinforced what I’d always believed: Start with what you want to achieve, instead of limiting yourself to what’s realistic or sustainable. Or, as I like to say, don’t ruin a story with the facts. Eventually, you’ll reverse engineer your great idea and figure out what’s possible and cost-effective and all the other boring grown-up stuff. But you should start with what you want to achieve.

GuidaraUnreasonable Hospitality
p.238

Related Quotes

I’ve seen way too many people come out of the corporate world, decide to start a company, and be completely unprepared for what it takes. If they’ve never been on a small team starting from scratch, they’re often a fish out of water. They spend too much money too fast. Hire too many people. Don’t put in the time, don’t have the startup mentality, can’t make hard decisions, are buried by consensus thinking. They end up making mediocre products or

nothing at all.

Don’t let that be your story. If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn’t come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you’re headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven “asshole.” [See also: Chapter 2.3: Assholes: Mission-driven “assholes.”]

So do the work. Know what you’re getting into. Trust your gut.

And when the time comes, you’ll be ready.

FadellBuild
p.188

Later—much later—I read ShunryĆ« Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and realized that coming back to the beginner’s mind is a do-over. “If I allow myself,” I tell Andrew, “then I can have an infinite number of doovers.” I explained that we can always return to what is, what is really happening, what is truly present.

ColonnaReboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up
p.150-151

A team led by Professor Dan Schwartz evaluated two groups. One started with three ideas in parallel, then subsequently had two more ideas on the way to their final idea. The second team started with one idea and then iterated four more times. Each team generated five rounds of ideas, but the parallel team did much better—generating more ideas and clearly better final solutions. The serial team—who started with just one idea—tended to keep refining the same idea over and over, never really innovating. The conclusion is that if your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations. Designers have known this all along—you don’t want to start with just one idea, or you’re likely to get stuck with it. Try not to think of your Odyssey Plans as “Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C”—where A is the really good plan and B is the okay plan and C is the plan that you really hope you don’t get stuck with but that you would accept as tolerable if absolutely necessary. Every Odyssey Plan is a Plan A, because it’s really you and it’s really possible.

Burnett, EvansDesigning Your Life
p.79-80

3. The Brainstorm Itself


The Rules of Brainstorming

  1. Go for quantity, not quality.
  1. Defer judgment and do not censor ideas.
  1. Build off the ideas of others.
  1. Encourage wild ideas.
Burnett, EvansDesigning Your Life
p.107

When you spend this much time encouraging your team to contribute, you’d better make sure your team knows that your doors are always open to ideas. There’s a better way to do everything, and I made it clear: if you had an idea for how we could improve, I wanted to hear it. The first time someone comes to you with an idea, listen closely, because how you handle it will dictate how they choose to contribute in the future. Dismiss them that first time, and you’ll extinguish a flame that’s difficult to rekindle.

GuidaraUnreasonable Hospitality
p.116