I have a lot of ideas, maybe not all great ideas, but every once in a while, I hit on something really good. How do I come up with these ideas? Well, there are multiple ways I massage the grey matter to form ideas. There are three main ways.
- Observing the environment around me and thinking about how I could improve a situation with the knowledge I already have.
- Talk with friends, coworkers, and family members to bounce ideas off them and get an outside perspective.
- Listen to podcasts and audiobooks who will present topics that might trigger the lightbulb moment that gives me the answer I was looking for.
By far my most common way of formulating new ideas is the third way: listening to podcasts and audiobooks. But that is not the most efficient way I’ve found, for that I turn to talking out the problem with others. I’ve been able to recreate this to a degree with A.I., but the process is tedious, and the results are more often than not subpar. Not to mention that when I’m working on a problem for my employer, I can’t use A.I. since it could involve proprietary information. This is why, when I’m totally stumped by a problem, I seek out others to bounce ideas off of and get a different perspective.
The Problem
This is something that is an issue with most employers, they don’t encourage breakout groups to work on problems. Sure, you may have one employee who has ideas on their off time and then presents them to you, but you aren’t getting the full potential of your workforce this way. When one person develops the idea and the solution, you only get their perspective, and that perspective is limited because they are using their personal time to work on the idea and solution, and therefore might not put as much effort into it since they aren’t getting paid for their time.
This is why employers should embrace the breakout group idea and encourage employees to come together and work on issues they see. Maybe you put the “internal outsider” as discussed in a previous post (The Internal Outsider) in charge of the group to lead outside-the-box thinking and keep the project moving. Maybe you have a project manager who can lead the team. Or maybe you just let the team form naturally and work in the way that works best for them. The options are all out there, and testing each one will allow you to see which method yields the best results.
But my employees are remote, they can’t work together
First of all, with all the technology we have today to connect with each other, this is a complete fallacy. When I started with my current employer, we were in the office 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and we all became remote. During that time in the office, we almost never talked; we just sat at our desks and stayed quiet because others around us were trying to focus. After we became remote, we talked all the time. We were able to use Microsoft Teams voice-only chats to talk one-on-one and in group chats. And my management team collected data that proved that our productivity actually went up while working from home. During those chats, we were able to talk about things that made our work more difficult and support each other more effectively with work-related issues. Now, obviously, I can’t detail the results of what we came up with, but processes were improved and a whole new position was created to solve an issue that has saved the company easily 10 times what the position costs (my employer’s words, not mine).
In my post Interactive error reporting for faster remediation and boosting morale I brought up the idea of using a Reddit-style forum to allow employees to list issues they saw and then allow other employees to vote on those ideas so management could see what the most pressing issues are. This style of forum could be used in this case also, it’s basically the same idea, infact you could have to tag system, with one tag being “ISSUE” and another being “SOLUTION” then if an employee has an issue or a solution other can vote the to surface the most pressing or best idea, and then they can go into the comments for the post and contribute to the issue or solution to help solve the issue or improve the solution.
Conclusion
There is no perfect way to get ideas from those who are doing the work, but if you don’t at least try to give your staff a method, then you won’t get much, if anything at all. Maybe it’s allowing for breakout groups during work hours, maybe it’s an internal forum for group discussion and voting, or maybe it’s just encouraging employees to chat more while they work. It’s all about testing out ideas and seeing what works. To quote Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come”.
