Advice
Why Your Team's Brainstorming Sessions Are Probably Rubbish (And What Actually Works)
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Three months ago, I walked into a boardroom in Brisbane where twelve highly paid executives were sitting around a whiteboard covered in sticky notes, all nodding enthusiastically about their "breakthrough innovation session." The topic? How to improve customer satisfaction scores that had been flatlining for eighteen months.
After two hours of "blue sky thinking" and "ideation," their revolutionary solution was to send follow-up emails asking customers to rate their experience. Groundbreaking stuff, really.
This is why most workplace brainstorming sessions are about as effective as a chocolate teapot. Everyone thinks they're being creative, but they're actually just recycling the same tired ideas in a slightly different wrapper.
The Real Problem With Problem Solving
Here's what 73% of Australian businesses get wrong about creative problem solving: they confuse activity with progress. Just because people are talking, writing on whiteboards, and using fancy frameworks doesn't mean they're actually solving anything meaningful.
I've been running creative problem solving workshops for fifteen years now, and the pattern is always the same. Companies call me in when they're stuck, but half the time they're not even solving the right problem. They're like someone frantically polishing the deck chairs on the Titanic – lots of motion, wrong focus.
The worst session I ever facilitated was for a Melbourne manufacturing company. Spent three days working on "How to reduce workplace accidents" when the real issue was that their safety officer had quit six months earlier and nobody had bothered replacing him. Sometimes the creative solution is just doing the obvious thing you've been avoiding.
What Actually Drives Innovation (Spoiler: It's Not Brainstorming)
Real creative problem solving happens when you stop trying to be creative and start trying to be useful. Sounds backwards, doesn't it?
Take James Dyson – the man didn't sit around a room throwing out random vacuum cleaner ideas. He identified a specific problem (traditional vacuum cleaners lose suction) and obsessively worked on that one thing for years. That's not creative brainstorming; that's methodical problem solving with a creative outcome.
I learned this the hard way back in 2019 when I was working with a Perth logistics company. They wanted to "innovate their way out of" late delivery problems. After two expensive facilitated sessions full of wild ideas about drones and AI, the solution turned out to be buying better route planning software and actually training their drivers to use GPS properly.
Revolutionary? Hardly. Effective? Absolutely.
The Framework That Actually Works
Here's my contrarian take: the best creative problem solving framework is the most boring one. Forget design thinking workshops and innovation labs. Start with this:
Step 1: Define the actual problem. Not the symptoms, not what people think the problem is, but the root cause. Most teams skip this step because it's hard work that doesn't feel creative.
Step 2: Research what others have tried. This is where creativity actually happens – combining existing solutions in new ways. Reinventing the wheel is rarely creative; it's usually just wasteful.
Step 3: Generate terrible ideas first. I know this sounds wrong, but hear me out. When you get all the obvious, stupid solutions out of your system, your brain starts reaching for something better.
Step 4: Test small and fail fast. Build prototypes with cardboard and sticky tape. Run pilots with five customers, not fifty. Learn what doesn't work before you invest in what might.
The beauty of this approach is that it works for everything from strategic planning to daily operational challenges.
Why Constraints Beat Freedom Every Time
Give someone unlimited time and budget to solve a problem, and they'll probably spend six months overthinking it. Give them a week and $500, and they'll find a solution.
I proved this working with a Sydney accounting firm last year. Their "problem" was that client meetings were running too long and cutting into billable hours. The partners wanted to hire a consultancy to redesign their entire client experience journey – probably would've cost them $80,000 and taken months.
Instead, I gave their junior staff two weeks to solve it with whatever resources they had in the office. Their solution? A simple timer app that projected meeting progress on the wall, plus a one-page summary template for complex discussions. Total cost: zero dollars. Time saved per meeting: average of fifteen minutes.
Constraints force you to be resourceful rather than just throwing money at problems.
The Mythology of Team Creativity
Let me share an unpopular opinion: most problems are solved by individuals, not teams. Teams are great for implementing solutions and stress-testing ideas, but the actual breakthrough moments usually happen when someone's alone with the problem.
Think about it – when did you last have a genuine eureka moment in a meeting room full of people? The best insights come in the shower, during your commute, or when you're supposed to be doing something else entirely.
This doesn't mean teams are useless for creative problem solving. But their role should be different. Use teams to challenge individual ideas, not to generate them. One person comes up with a solution, then the team tears it apart and rebuilds it better.
I've seen this work brilliantly at companies like Atlassian, where they give developers "ShipIt Days" – 24 hours to work on whatever problem interests them, alone or in tiny groups. Some of their best product features started this way.
The Australian Advantage
There's something about the Australian business culture that's actually perfect for creative problem solving, though most of us don't realise it. We're naturally skeptical of overcomplicated solutions and we value practical results over impressive presentations.
The problem is we've been convinced that innovation has to look like Silicon Valley – all glass offices and bean bags and unlimited brainstorming sessions. But some of the most innovative Australian companies solve problems the way we've always solved them: by getting on with it and figuring out what works.
Look at Bunnings. Their "innovation" was realising that people don't just want to buy tools – they want to understand how to use them. So they hired staff who actually know what they're talking about and let customers test products. Not exactly rocket science, but it revolutionised hardware retail in Australia.
When Creative Problem Solving Goes Wrong
The biggest mistake I see teams make is falling in love with their first good idea. They mistake novelty for quality and end up implementing solutions that are creative but impractical.
I worked with a Gold Coast tourism company that spent months developing an elaborate augmented reality app for hotel guests. Very innovative, very expensive, very time-consuming to build. When they finally launched it, usage was terrible because most of their guests just wanted reliable WiFi and decent coffee.
Sometimes the creative solution is admitting that the boring solution is better.
The Reality Check Framework
Before you implement any "creative" solution, run it through these three filters:
The Grandmother Test: Could you explain this solution to your grandmother in under two minutes? If not, it's probably overcomplicated.
The Monday Morning Test: Will people actually use this solution when they're tired, stressed, and dealing with real-world problems? Creative solutions that only work under ideal conditions aren't solutions.
The Six-Month Test: Will this still seem like a good idea when the novelty wears off? Many creative solutions are just regular solutions with unnecessary bells and whistles attached.
Most importantly, remember that the goal isn't to be creative – it's to solve problems. Creativity is just one tool in the toolkit, and sometimes the hammer works better than the Swiss Army knife.
The best creative problem solving often looks remarkably uncreative from the outside. But that's fine. Your customers care about results, not your process.
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