Brainstorm with and without AI

- By now you've tested your assumptions about the problem and are confident you know which assumptions are the right ones to solve for. Now it's time to come up with real solutions. I'm sure you're itching to ask AI for solutions right away, but not yet. I want you to press pause on AI just for now. Instead, I want you to first spend a few minutes thinking on your own about possible solutions. Maybe you have a few hunches already. Here's what you'll do. Take out a piece of paper or open up a Word document and spend five minutes jotting down as many solutions as you can think of without judging whether they're good or bad. In fact, bad ideas are welcome. You're aiming for volume, not brilliance. And the more ideas you have, the more likely you'll have good ideas because every bad idea is the cousin of a really good idea. So just write them down, stream of consciousness style and get them on paper. If it helps, you can use the following questions to guide your thinking. What's the simplest solution to the problem I can imagine? What's a wild or weird solution to the problem, which probably won't work, but what if it did? How would my boss approach this solution? Or what solution could I propose with unlimited resources or if I had no resources at all? And if you have teammates, we can bring them into this activity as well, but only after you do it first on your own. You can do this live in person or even virtually in a 10 minute exercise. Or you can do it asynchronously via email, Slack or Teams messaging. Here's what to ask your colleagues. Hey, I'm trying to solve this problem that I've identified. Explain the problem in one sentence. Given the context, insert two or three bullet points about the problem. How would you recommend I solve this problem? You can think of solutions that are easy and small or big and totally out of the box. Ask them to answer with whatever comes to mind. No pressure. They don't need to overthink it. So why don't I want you to start brainstorming with AI right away? This is because we humans bring a lot of experience, wisdom, and empathy to problem solving. And if you want to maximize the likelihood of good solutions that are both relevant and empathetic, we need to ground them in a human context first. And only you know how to do that. AI doesn't. So we begin brainstorming as humans without AI in order to limit the potential bias that AI has to confirm what it hears. This is because AI large language models are kind of like golden retrievers and parrots. They just want to make you happy and mimic everything that you say. So let's avoid that entirely by brainstorming solo first without AI. Even if your solutions aren't perfect, they'll give you a great baseline to start solving the problem effectively. And then we can add AI to jazz up the solutions. This is the real magic in human and AI problem solving. We co-create solutions together rather than outsourcing it to AI. Alright, before we team up with AI, please spend five minutes right now brainstorming solutions solo. I know, I get it, but please trust me. It's really worth it. And if you want to get feedback from your teammates, add another 10 minutes for a quick conversation. So get out your pen and paper and let's get brainstorming.