You wouldn't play chess without a chessboard. There are just too many pieces to keep track of.

Why do you solve problems without a BrainSwarming graph to visualize all the aspects of your problem and their relationships?

Just as there are different chess pieces, there are different components of a problem. A problem has a goal, which can be rephrased in many ways. A problem has resources, which you use to accomplish your goal. Each resource has features, which help you notice how to use that resource to solve your problem. Finally, a potential solution to your problem has interacted your some of your resources together to solve the problem.

When you put these four components in their proper location on a graph, you can instantly see how they all relate to each other.

Figure 2 is called a BrainSwarming graph because groups of people can work together as a "swarm" and build a graph that keeps track of all their ideas and how they relate to each other.

As people refine the goal, the top of the graph grows downward. As people interact the resources (and their features) together, the bottom of the graph grows upward. When the two directions connect, you have your first potential solution that shows itself as a path connecting your resources with the goal.

Sample Problem: Save the People on the Titanic
Figure 3 shows how one group created many ways to save many people on the Titanic. The original solution, put people in lifeboats, only saved 705 of the 2,228 passengers (only 32% of the passengers).

The original solution, put people in lifeboats, was rephrased in Figure 3 by describing lifeboats by their key features to create put people on floating things. Once this rephrasing occurred, then people noticed many possible resources that could help save the passengers.

People noticed that the iceberg is a floating thing that could possibly been used to keep people out of the water. They noticed wooden tables, wooden planks, steamer trunks--even car tires and inner tubes from the estimated 40 cars in storage. Each of these floating things could have been used in isolation or in combination with other floating things to keep people out of the water.

The BrainSwarming Graph shows all these things and how they might interact with each other to help accomplish the goal. And all this came from just one way of rephrasing the goal. There are many other useful resources that we did not include in Figure 3.

Your problems are most likely as complicated as the Titanic problem. Visualizing the many components of your problem and their relationships may be a matter of life and death for your company--if not literally a life and death matter.

BrainSwarming Graphs reduce the complexity of problems to a simple and intuitive visualization method. We have techniques help you notice more of each component: more ways to rephrase your goal, more resources, more features, and more interaction. The more you notice, the more innovative you will be!

Contact Dr. Tony McCaffrey (tony@innovationaccelerator.com) to start your team on BrainSwarming Graphs.

They will be able to work together more easily, visualize your complex problems more simply, and create more solutions.

Thinking outside the box is the dominant metaphor for innovation. This metaphor, however, does not tell us how to get outside the box and how that outer space is structured. Fortunately, a BrainSwarming Graph brings all that is outside the box inside the graph and structures it well.

When you are solving a problem, there are four basic components. First, you start out with a Goal and refine it downwards. You also start out with Resources that can be used to accomplish the goal. As these Resources are deconstructed into Features, the graph grows upward. Finally, as the resources are combined into Interactions to solve parts or all of the problem, the graph continues to grow upward. When the top-down growth and the bottom-up growth connect, you have your first possible solution!

What is outside the box is what we are overlooking. In a BrainSwarming Graph, we are either overlooking something about the Goal, a Resource, a Feature, or an Interaction. Fortunately, we have a whole set of techniques to help us notice more about each of these four types of things.

Sample Problem: Save People on the Titanic
 As shown in Figure 2, the original solution was to put people in lifeboats. This solution only saved 705 of 2,228 people (or only 32% of the people). Only 32% of the people were saved even though they had lifeboats for half of the people. Many things were overlooked that could have been helpful and all of these overlooked things have their place inside a BrainSwarming Graph.

What is important about lifeboats that is being overlooked? Describe a lifeboat generically in terms of its size, shape, material, etc. They were wooden and floated, for starters. With that we can rephrase our goal to put people in floating things. (We keep the graph simple we did not also include the goal put people in wooden things, but we could have.)

Once we focus on floating things, then people think of many options: Iceberg, Wooden Tables, Wooden Tables, Wooden Planks, Steamer Trunks (tie them together to make a platform), Wooden Crates, Rubber Tires and Inner Tubes (from the 40 cars that were in storage). See Figure 4 below. Platforms could be built from the many floating things that people thought of. Also, perhaps there were flat spots on the iceberg that people could climb onto after lifeboats ferried some of them there.

All these things that are considered outside the box because they are overlooked have their place inside a BrainSwarming Graph. The graph has room for overlooked components of the four basic types: Goal, Resources, Features, and Interactions. 

In this way, a BrainSwarming Graph structures and visualizes everything you notice and leaves room for the things you are overlooking. We have techniques to help you continually fill in more and more of the graph until the key things are noticed that pave the way for new solutions.

Contact Dr. Tony McCaffrey (tony@innovationaccelerator.com) to learn more or inquire about a training session in BrainSwarming.