Cerebrate Good Times

Based on years of research and hundreds of real-world experiments, here's the best way to inject fresh thinking into your workplace.

The most wonderful time of the year is almost here.

No, I’m not talking about Christmas, it’s way more exciting than that: the start of a new Australian financial year! In just under two months we’ll turn over a blank spreadsheet with a fresh set of forecasted numbers for everyone to chase down each quarter.

Depending on where you or your workplace are up to on the annual planning calendar, you’re either deep into thinking up strategies, plans and budgets for the upcoming new financial year, or you’re trying to judiciously tick off your annual plan already.

Wherever you’re at, when it comes to planning for the future it can be easy to fall into the usual trap of repeating the same ideas, with small tweaks, year after year. That’s where simple visual tools like the Sigmoid curve comes in. It’s a concept that can be used to explain the natural life cycle of many things: plants, love, business ideas and even our own careers. It’s a reflection that everything goes in cycles, the good times, bad times and the somewhere-in-between times. The only constant is that at any given point we are somewhere on the curve.

My business partner Neil became obsessed by the Sigmoid curve for a few years around the 2010s. Barely a meeting would go by when he wouldn’t sketch it out on the whiteboard and challenge everyone to point out where they thought we were on it. As well as creating a company in-joke, it became one of our most useful ways of thinking about new projects. For my book Cult Status I adapted the traditional Sigmoid curve into the Cult Curve (below). The wavy line represents a project and how its success changes over time.

The curve can be applied to anything, and it’s especially important when you’re thinking of how to inject new thinking into an existing strategy. It could be tinkering with your product, launching a new idea, or changing something dramatic like the pricing, but you generally have to do something to start a new growth spurt.

The ideal time is before you’ve hit the peak of your growth phase. That way, you can ride through the learning phase for the next idea at the same time as reaping the original benefits. By launching a new product, or questioning the way you’re doing something before you reach the top of your success, you can set yourself up for the next growth path. Of course, there will be a transition phase as you move from one growth path to the next, but if you don’t attempt it, you’ll just slowly ride the decline down to the bottom.

This is what fresh thinking looks like as a graph:

The best thing about any Sigmoid curve? It can be repeated over and over again, with lessons from each arc reducing the length and severity of the transition and learning stages.

So - and here’s the million dollar question - how do you come up with new ways of continuing to innovate? For this month’s One Useful Thing I’m going to introduce you to one of my own creations that I’ve designed specifically to help you come up with better ideas at work to help kick off new stages of growth.

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One Useful Thing for May 2023: Cerebration Model

I’ve spent many years studying research on creativity, experimenting and trying to solving for some of the reasons why it generally sucks when people come together to generate ideas. This model uses the best parts of divergent and convergent thinking, and I’ve tested it out hundreds of time in groups ranging from one to four hundred people.

A Cerebration is combination of two words, cerebral and celebration, so think of it like a party for your brain. It’s a streamlined way to come up with better ideas as a group, and now is the perfect time to be doing it on your annual calendar.

How to use this: There are three main parts to using this idea-generating technique, each named after different elements of a party to make it easy to remember when you’re next sitting in your boardroom wondering what to do.

To hold a Cerebration session, grab some of your colleagues together in a room or on Zoom (this tool has been built to work just as well in a hybrid world), and run through these three steps:

1. Blow up balloons

Talk about your problem. Every creative idea is a solution to a problem, but there might be multiple solutions to multiple problems. One way to channel your creativity is to focus on one problem at a time. To do that, draw a giant balloon shape.

Begin with the primary problem that you’re trying to solve, and think about all the ways this main problem is made up of lots of smaller problems that each ladder up to it. Narrow it down to two to three smaller problems, then turn each of them into a simple question and write them inside your balloon. It should look something like this:

2. Write out cards

After the balloons have been drawn up with a problem inside each of them, focus on each problem one at a time.

To do this, just shut up. Don’t share ideas, don’t start talking, don’t tell people what you think. Everyone in the session should get their own sticky-note pad and spend time coming up with their own ideas in silence. Start a timer and spend five minutes on each problem before moving on collectively to the next one.

This step of individually coming up with ideas is one of the rare things that works even better on video conferencing than it does in real life, as it’s easy to tune everyone out when you’re by yourself with just a computer screen in front of you. At the end of this part, you should have generated lots of individual ideas that are ready to be shared with the rest of the group.

3. Share the presents

After everyone has generated as many ideas as they can without input from each other, it’s time to use the power of collective thought to sort through them.

This is the really enjoyable part where you can share your thoughts with the group, and connect ideas, riff on them and see which ones are the most creative way of solving the problem. To avoid the usual people dominating the conversation, use this simple trick when it’s time to share: the person whose birthday is coming up next should share their ideas, and go in that order. This keeps it random, interesting and fair.

The first person reads out what’s on their sticky note. Group the ideas inside the relevant balloons, with all the ideas that share a similar theme positioned near each other. Each person in the group should take a turn explaining their ideas for each problem, one after another, until the balloons are full of ideas. Build on top of each others ideas as you go.

After they are all up on a physical or virtual board together, answer the following questions:

• Which ideas stand out the most?
• How can you build on top of these to make them better?
• Which ideas can you connect together?
• Are there any ideas that get you really excited?
• Which idea scares you the most?
• What’s an idea you could implement tomorrow?

Once you get to the end of this process, you’ll have dozens of fresh, new, exciting ways of solving your problem to help kick you into a new phase on your Sigmoid curve. This is a shortened version of the full Cerebration model that’s detailed with a heap of live examples in Killer Thinking.

It is one the most useful, and tested, tools to come up with new ideas, and can be played around with and adapted to solve any problems at work, or even outside of it. Good luck putting it into practice, it’s genuinely a lot of fun and right now is the perfect time of the year to do it.

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Reader Plusses

‘Plussing’ is a term Walt Disney used to describe adding to ideas to make them better, so each month I’m going to share some of the best builds that readers have added to make these tools even more useful.

Last month’s OUTLET was all about User Manuals, and there were lots of great comments underneath it. Some plusses:

• Perzen Patel says she revisits her teams’s user manuals every 3 months, and added an interesting subject: "In times of high pressure I tend to act like this....". She writes: “My event planning/obsessive detail requiring self can come out during high pressure [situations] and this question helped my team understand that I was not micromanaging them. I've given them the rule book for what I need from them in that instance.”

• Steph Clarke shared a useful site, Manual of Me, where you can create and share your User Manual as a URL to anyone.

Please dive into the comments section at the end of this post directly on Substack to add any plusses, suggestions, comments or questions you have. I’ll share the best of them in next month’s newsletter.

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Lastly, a very warm welcome to over 1,000 new subscribers who have arrived here via a warm recommendation from the legends at The Squiz. If you’re new around here, check out past editions on useful topics like a treasure trove of research presentations, a great model for collaboration and more.

I’m writing this from Mallorca, our new Spanish home in one of the most beautiful and diverse islands. I’m deep into the second draft of my new book on work that will come out next year. On a recent hike up one of the picturesque mountains that line the spine of Mallorca I was explaining my latest thinking on the structure of the book to my husband, and I had a real breakthrough on how to pull many of the disparate strands together into a clear narrative. So that was pretty damn exciting.

I’m back in Australia in a few weeks for a packed calendar of events, keynotes and meetings, and I seriously can’t wait.

Until next month, yours in usefulness.

T.