What Your Participants
See, Hear, Feel, and Think
in a Solution Session

Bill is the damnedest mix of gentle listener and wild provocateur.

He mixed supportive listening and encouragement with comments that are wild, outlandish, provocative, impractical, and hilarious. It opened our minds. We had wild moments of “fall on the floor”laughter. By the end of the day, exhausted and happy, we were amazed to see we’d created a seedbed of over 100 fascinating ideas.

A key is developing “big bad ideas.”

Our internal problem solving hadn’t been wild enough.

Bill got us thinking of wild “if only...” ideas, even encouraging those that break physical laws! He used analogies and metaphors to draw out of us “big bad ideas” related to the problem. We started with the absurd—way, way, way outside the box. Amazingly the big breakthroughs came out of those broken ideas.

Then he helped us transition to consensus, commitment, and action plans. He showed us how to monetize creative breakthroughs.

Bill’s “Problem > Breakthrough” Matrix

Bill’s distinctions between ideas and solutions

A group stuck in an unsolved burning problem feels helpless but later, having solved it, they feel powerful.

One aspect of the problem was like walking in dark fog. But one guy blurted out a weird idea which created a chain reaction, and led to a fantastic breakthrough solution. It was like the sun came out and the world became comfortable, easy, and happy.

We felt like a close-knit family who just solved an impossible problem together.

After the big idea crystallized, the implementation solutions came along like a fireworks display, and we couldn’t stop triggering each other. The more we did it, the better we got at it.

Wait a minute! Hey suppose...

Don’t laugh, because if we...

There were some brilliant people in the room, but Bill’s approaches seemed to amplify their brilliance.

Solved fast enough? Solved well enough?

You could see the frustration in the eyes of everyone walking down the office hallways. The damn burning problem had been smoldering too long. Our competitive position was at risk. Our jobs were at risk. Maybe even the company’s survival was at risk.

Our view was that it couldn’t be solved fast enough, well enough, cheap enough. Even our most brilliant people had grown jaded.

Yet, to our amazement, in our sessions with Bill we found the solution that not only saved the situation. It also made us each stronger. Amazing.

“We can do it on our own”

Some of my best people thought “OK, it’s a tough problem, but why hire an outside facilitator? We’re smart, we have the technology and the industry knowledge, and we’ll probably conquer it if we just keep thinking, talking, and trying things.”

What I said that finally got them wanting a Solution Session project with Bill was when I pointed out “While we keep trying our competitors aren’t sitting on their hands. And there’s the chance we might never solve it! Hey, in sessions with Bill, all the solutions will still come from us, but it might get us there faster, at lower competitive risk, at lower labor cost, and maybe even with bigger breakthroughs.”

Bill describes a breakthrough session
(from his upcoming book)

I was facilitating a two-day session for a group of Ph.D. scientists who had been assembled from the R & D lab of an organization that was having a production problem with one of its products. It was after 10:00 in the morning on the first day and all I was hearing were the same old ideas they had mentioned during the prior two hours and at the planning meeting, so I decided we definitely needed a change of course. I said to them, “I’d like to engage you in an experiment which will take no more than five minutes and if you don’t like it, we won’t do it again for the rest of the two days.” They all agreed.

I told them I wanted them to start thinking about lies regarding physical phenomena and gave them a minute of so to make some notes on their lap pads. At the end of that time, a nuclear physicist in the group (an absolutely brilliant man with whom I had worked before in a different context) asked to be the first contributor. I sensed he felt pretty strongly about his example so I said, “Sure,” and this was his example:

“You know...” (and although he didn’t use the word, “kids,” it was implicit in the way he was talking to his colleagues), “it’s a little known fact that if you suck on a dog whistle, the dog will go further away!”

You need to imagine the laughter at the most hilarious event you’ve ever attended to know what happened. It was uproarious! Once again I was on my hands and knees laughing so hard. The client let the energy in the group run its course and as it began to dissipate, he said, “Hey, wait a minute, that is a perfect example of an irreversible phenomenon and that’s exactly the problem we’re having with this process. Sometimes we drive it too far and we don’t have any way to bring it back.”

The catalysis chemist chimed right in, “You know, we have a catalyst such that if you zap it in one direction it will go one way and if you zap it in the other direction it will go the reverse way. The client’s eyes were wide with amazement. “No shit?” he asked,“No shit” came the response. Within two minutes they had a new idea they could take back to the lab and do as a bench test, then write up as an IPD (initial patent disclosure).

Even though we had only been working for a short period of time I told them we’d take a short break (to dissipate the leftover energy). During the break every one of them came up to me saying, “That was so much fun!” “And so productive!” “Can we do something like that in the next session?” “Can we do something like that in every session from now on?”, etc. I said “Yes” and each session produced new & exciting ideas they could bench test when they returned to the lab as well as a lot of precursory laughter.

Please don’t disregard the value of a “Whistler” in your meetings. Don’t discount the laughter and the absurd. They are both signs of a whole lot of mental energy and if you allow that energy to be harnessed rather than ignored, it can produce amazing results for you.

Also Revealing

Bill & Cavas reveal some of their keys to great sessions.