Great minds think alike.
No, sorry. Common minds think alike. Great minds have different ideas. Very different ideas.
We hear it a lot. “Great minds think alike.” We even say it ourselves. Particularly when someone else has the same idea we have. No delusion there.
Yeah, it’s only an expression. And, yeah, often times it’s probably said with a wink. But the truth is great minds are much less likely to fall into the same old thought patterns that lead to predictable ideas. And we mere mortals, when we’re at our creative best, we’re not entertaining common ideas either.
I could talk about finding original ideas as an individual. But, of course, that’s what we discuss in 90% of the posts in this blog. So how about putting this in the context of group brainstorming, where a bunch of people are thinking about the same issue? So, in group think isn’t similar thinking validation that an idea is good? No, it’s validation that an idea is common and probably not particularly differentiating from a marketing standpoint.
My fellow Before & After creative thinking coaches and I lead brainstorming sessions where groups are looking for new ideas. In the vast majority of instances we’re looking for new ideas to gain a competitive advantage; new products or services, new promotion ideas, etc. The last thing we need is to have people thinking alike.
But, of course, members of the same company or industry, people with similar backgrounds, faced with the same challenge often do come up with the similar ideas. So it takes a concerted effort to head off this duplication.
When we brainstorm we usually work with a group of 20 - 30 people. The first thing we do is separate them into teams of 4 or 5. Like an army, dividing and conquering. Or, a search party, spreading out.
At the end of the day (or 3 hours, more typically) we usually have over 1,000 ideas, sometimes a lot more. And, guess what? In spite of our best efforts to elicit diverse thought, about 60 - 80% of ideas are duplicated in more than one team. Sometimes the same ideas are found in all teams.
Do you think if we found these ideas then our competition might be able to find them as well? To ask is to answer.
Besides splintering our efforts in small sub-teams, to keep duplication to a minimum, we do a number of other things to set teams off in different directions, And using 100MPH Thinking™ (a cornerstone of the DIY Lobotomy thinking process), which I discussed in a post last week on the law of large numbers, we don’t totally prevent minds thinking alike, but we make the duplication a non factor.
I recall in the late ‘90’s when I was facilitating a BS session in Toronto for Sears (BS, our code for brainstorming), we determined in advance that any idea that was duplicated in any number of teams was to be eliminated. We were looking for a big millennium promotion idea. (Remember the millennium?) We only had one shot to get it right, right? No come backs. The entire budget would be wasted if we were preempted on this idea. Can you understand why we weren’t looking for any minds to think alike?
People often use duplication to validate an ideas worthiness, playing the “great minds” card. We’ll, I can’t tell you about worthiness, but I will say that often duplication can be an indication of obviousness, the more duplication by different people on brainstorming teams, likely the more obvious, which, forget the one shot opportunity of the millennium, every day in this competitive business world coming up with the obvious means the other guy probably knows what you’re thinking and can then decide to do you one better, or at least defend your obvious idea.
I remember the last pitch I was involved in at my former ad agency Leonard/Monahan. We had done ironclad research, had developed a wickedly insightful strategy and done absolutely spectacular creative. We thought.
When we didn’t get the account we asked the client why and he replied. “we liked the other agency’s cockroach idea better than your cockroach idea.” Great minds, all right.
The next time you have an idea the same as someone else take that as a cue that you better keep thinking.
© 2007 Tom Monahan, all rights reserved.
