Focus and flare.
During my very first visit to the d.school at Stanford back in 2010 I was introduced to the idea of Focus and Flare.
The teaching team was trying to model how to be more effective brainstormers, and one of the tools they gave us was to be intentional about when we’re generating ideas (flare) and when we’re evaluating ideas (focus).
This was pretty mind-blowing for me as I’d only ever participated in ideation sessions where senior leaders and managers judged our ideas as we came up with them…which sucked. But I didn’t know there was another way, so I just accepted it.
Once we started intentionally practicing generating ideas without evaluation, things flowed so much more freely. It felt so different, and I was no longer hesitant to offer up ideas for fear of being called out in front of my colleagues.
Conversely, when we moved to intentionally evaluate ideas I found that I was happy to do so because I knew we had to get down to 1 or 2 ideas out of the 100’s that we came up with.
There are several reasons why this is a helpful method for coming up with new ideas, but I also want to say that this practice of separating the generation of ideas from selecting ideas has altered the way I think, the way I treat others, and has just as consistently affected my personal life as well as my professional life.
A Short Story:
Years ago, my wife and I are planning a trip to Paris.
She sent me an email with 3 Airbnb options.
I replied by choosing 1 and letting her know I was ready to book it.
She replied with 3 more options.
I replied with my preferences from her initial email and from the second email. And then let her know I was ready to get it booked and settled. +I got a 3rd reply with 3 more options.
It was at this point that I realized she was in flare mode, and I was in focus. For her, looking at lots of different places where we might stay in Paris was part of the vacation. For me, it just felt like a prerequisite.
So, I stopped “focusing” and decided to join her in the “flare” phase of vacation planning, which was much more enjoyable (for both of us). Then we found it fairly easy to select the 2 apartments we wanted to stay in while in Paris. I believe this was so much easier because we had been on the same page while flaring!
When it comes to generating ideas and selecting one to move forward with, both generation (flare) and evaluation (focus) are necessary and good. But there is WAY less friction if you do these separately from each other!
