Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, Einstein publishing General Relativity, Martin Luther King Jr. giving the "I Have a Dream" speech. It seems that our world is built on the foundation of great ideas. Those who came up with these ideas are called geniuses. We often hear these great ideas as they come naturally, with a stroke of genius, without understanding the struggle behind coming up with great ideas.
Three key learnings from the field of business design will provide insight into how to develop great ideas when solving any problem. These three insights offer a method for generating ingenious ideas without the need for being a genius.
1. Great ideas are good answers to brilliant questions
The “Slow Elevator” problem by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg brilliantly sums up this idea. If you are an office building owner, and the tenants there complain, the elevator in the building is too old and too slow. They threaten that if you don't fix the elevator problem, they will break their leases. What will you do? There are two possible answers that you can come up with to solve the problem: either replacing the motor making the elevator goes faster, or you can put a mirror.
Facing the same problem, how is it possible to generate these two radically different ideas? It is because the answer, like any answer that you generate, will depend on the question that you ask. It is paramount to frame the right question; the question that solves the problem. Thus, the idea of replacing the elevator motor comes from answering the problem of how to make the elevator go faster. However, the mirror idea is generated by asking how to make the wait less annoying.
When my team and I were solving the problem for our client, a wine company trying to attract more millennials to purchase wine on their website, we changed the problem's framing. Instead of asking ourselves what is wrong with the website, we wondered how to help millennials understand the value of ordering ahead and making the wait time to order wine online more tolerable. This question guided our solution; our idea revolves around this problem.
2. Brilliant questions are found, not imagined
How to ask the right question? Brilliant questions are framed by deeply understanding your user's need. The user’s needs informs your questions.
What do people need? The first step in understanding people's needs starts by getting to know them. Learning about their behaviour, or their views on specific ideas will provide insight into their need. And most importantly, to empathizing with the user's point of view because when facing a problem, the user themselves does not necessarily know what they want. As Steve Jobs would say, it is our job to "figure out what they're going to want before they do." The only way to do that is by deeply understanding and empathizing with your customers.
One way to understand user’s needs is to conduct empathy interviews. These interviews free the researcher from the burden of using quantitative methods to gain insights that are hard to be captured by data. Empathy interviews consist of asking provocative questions about a subject and asking the interviewee to give their reaction or recall their personal stories. From these qualitative surveys, the researchers will draw user insights by interpreting the more profound need that users may not be aware of. For example, when we are solving the problem posed for the clients mentioned above, empathy interviews allow us to uncover that our customers look explicitly for three qualities when making a purchase: exclusivity, trusted recommendation, a feeling of being unique. These insights guided the solution that we offer.
3. Generating a great idea is a team sport
We put so much emphasis on the one individual who came up with a brilliant idea. However, in reality, generating great ideas requires a team effort. When Steve Jobs says that Apple does not rely on market research, its teams are the primary customers. When coming up with ideas, your teammates are the first customers you need to sell the ideas. They are the most demanding customers to satisfy. Thus they will provide the harshest and most insightful criticism that will push your idea to the next level. For example, in generating solutions for our clients, I offered to include bitters, a type of alcohol flavouring drink, as part of our solution. Yet, after challenges from my teammates, the idea is pushed to the next level. We ended up including syrups instead of bitters, which has a better connotation and is more appealing to our customer group while keeping the same logic.
