2(b) Brainstorming solutions

Figure 1. It’s time to spark your creativity and let the ideas fly! (CC0)

Now that you have identified your findings and have framed the problem, it is time to start considering possible solutions. Brainstorming good solutions requires that you keep in mind the information you gathered in your research. This will ensure that the ideas you develop will work for the community you are trying to help, whether it is your household, the school or an external group.

It is important to consider multiple leverage points when looking for solutions. Leverage points are places where a small change can have big results. If you made a systems diagram at some point in your research or when you framed the problem, you may want to mark areas where an intervention is possible. These could be in targeting areas of behaviour, areas of systems, or mental models. It could be that you see an opening with a particular stakeholder or some other group or element of the situation.

Let’s consider an example related to litter. This is a common problem in many communities and has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the area around trash bins of many cities. In Amsterdam, city officials are doing a pilot project to plant mini-gardens around trash bins. The idea is to get people to change their mental models about the acceptability of leaving trash next-to a bin, rather than putting it in the bin or taking the trash to another disposal area if the bins are full. According to Rick Vermen, a council official, the gardens may act as a kind of “moral appeal” to Amsterdam’s residents, as well as improving the look of the city streets. By making a simple change to the physical space around the trash bins, people’s values (mental models) may be triggered and changed, causing a change to their behaviour in the litter collection system. The leverage point here has to do with mental models, affected by changing the space around the bins.

Figure 2. Can gardens around trash bins (left image) prevent littering near them (right image)? (Engelmann, Koleva)

Generally speaking, it is easier to make changes to simple behaviours, towards the top of the Iceberg Model in Figure 3. However, these interventions tend to be the least effective; they do not have much leverage to affect a whole system. Interventions that affect systems directly or people’s mental models have more leverage, but are more difficult and take longer to do. They are worth considering, however, when you remember that systems affect behaviour, and mental models affect systems. So tackling people’s mental models and systems have huge and longer-lasting impacts on behaviour. If you really want to geek out on leverage points in systems thinking, you can have a look at the Leverage Points tool at the end of this Module. It describes 12 theoretical leverage points in systems thinking with some examples.

To get good ideas for your project, you will first need to go very wide with your thinking. Some of the best solutions can come from initially crazy ideas. Creativity, mixing ideas, thinking outside the box are all needed at this point. But generating a variety of ideas can be harder than you might think.

There are a number of reasons why your brain may not think as creatively or widely as you would like. One of them is the effect of priming. Priming is when exposure to an idea or stimulus affects your thinking on tasks. So, for example, if you were exposed to the idea of planting gardens around trash bins as a solution to a litter problem, it might prevent you from thinking about other interesting solutions. Your brain may focus on the issue of the space around the trash bin, and be unable to think outside that box. Be aware, that if you came into your project with an idea of how to solve it before you did any research, you might see the impact of priming. This is why we asked you to put those ideas into a parking lot in the Stage 1 Investigating overview. When you know about the effects of priming, you are more likely to be able to reduce its effects when you brainstorm.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming can be a great way to get lots of ideas on the table, but tends to work best in a group project. The idea is to power up the creative part of your brain, and dial down the evaluative part.

It is very important to write down the ideas in some way: paper, white board, post-its, whatever you have available. Post-its are particularly helpful; using them encourages everyone to participate, their equal size promotes a greater equity between decisions, their small size means that people have to summarize and keep ideas short and you can move them around easily.

It can be helpful to identify a person to manage the brainstorming session, so that others are purely involved with generating ideas. But having all people be able to stand, move, gesture, write, diagram is important too.

There are a number of rules for brainstorming, to ensure maximum creativity:

1. Aim for quantity over quality - get as many ideas out there as possible

2. Promote crazy ideas - out-of-the-box thinking leads to more out-of-the-box thinking. You could even think about asking for ideas you know won’t work to get things that are really outlandish.

3. Use other ideas as a basis for your own - build on your colleagues. Think about someone else’s idea and say “Yes! and…”

4. Don’t judge others ideas during brainstorming - this can shut down creativity

5. Remain focused on the problem, findings, systems, and frames and leverage points

6. Use all modes of communication - verbal, written, graphic, gestures

Redirect your brain out of the box - Sometimes prompts to get your brain going in a different direction can be really helpful. One technique for this is called SCAMPER prompts (Eberle), which are listed here and further elaborated on in the SCAMPER tool below. SCAMPER stands for a set of directives that move you to consider alternatives:

• Substitute

• Combine

• Adapt

• Modify

• Put to another use

• Eliminate

• Reverse

These simple prompts can often be enough to tweak your thinking to a new idea. Some questions to ask around each of these prompts are in the SCAMPER tool. You can make cards for them to have in a brainstorming session if needed.

After you have a wide range of ideas on the table, it is time to ‘go narrow’. This means filtering the ideas to select the one(s) that you want to try. There are many possible ways that you can filter ideas but four particularly useful ones will be discussed below.

Filter 1 - Grouping

As you brainstorm ideas, you will likely see that some are similar. You can group these together and it might give you further thoughts to refine the idea. You could also group ideas together by the area of the Iceberg Model they focus on: simple individual or group behaviours, systems, or mental models. You can also look to connect ideas that go together from these three groups - perhaps you can already see how mental models / systems / behaviour will work together in a solution.

Don’t be afraid at this point to discard bad ideas. You want to focus on the best, most promising ideas to move forward. However, you may not be ready to completely put those bad ideas in the trash; they can also go into the idea parking lot discussed in the Stage 1 Investigating overview. Remember, even bad ideas may have an insight that could be useful later. So park them, if you want, to revisit later if you find you are stuck again, or looking for an interesting new angle to try out.

Filter 3 - Impact / Feasibility

To narrow down ideas, you should also consider their impact and feasibility.

Impact refers to how much change will come about because of your action. Impact can be considered from a number of perspectives. High impact actions could affect large numbers of people, or affect people in a big way.

Feasibility refers to what extent you and your team have the ability to carry out the action, whether the action is ‘doable’. Your SWOT analysis may have already raised some issues for feasibility, but the questions below can help you determine whether an action is ‘doable’:

• do you and your team have the time to carry it out?

• do you and your team have the skills to carry it out?

• do you and your team have the resources to carry it out (including money)?

• will you and your team be able to get the required support (including approvals from authorities) to carry it out?

Filter 4 - Doughnut Model

You can further filter your ideas by examining them using the questions from the Doughnut Model matrix in Figure 8. At this point, you should be evaluating the possible actions by asking:

• will they help people in the local community thrive,

• will they regenerate and support, or at least do not harm to, the local-ecological environment (top right of the matrix),

• will they support (or at least do no harm to) the wellbeing of people worldwide (lower left of the matrix), and

• will they regenerate and support, or at least do no harm, for the global ecological environment.

You should aim for actions that answer all four questions in the affirmative.

Eberle, Bob. Scamper: Games for Imagination Development. Prufrock Press, 1996.

Engelmann, Maximilian. Trash gardens. 15 July 2020.

Koleva, Rosica. Trash. 19 May 2020.

Raworth, Kate et al. Doughnut Economics Action Lab, 2020, Amsterdam City Doughnut, www.kateraworth.com/2020/04/08/amsterdam-city-doughnut/.

Resource: Iceberg/Graphics Template. Waters Center for Systems Thinking, 2019, waterscenterst.org/resources/iceberg-graphics/.

Starks, Anthony. “AIGA Funnel.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 16 July 2012, https://tinyurl.com/y8yjp6f6.

Turner, Neil. “Walking.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 23 Mar. 2005, https://tinyurl.com/y8px5rkr.

van Vliet, Jakob. “Amsterdam Plants Mini-Gardens around Bins in Drive to Cut Littering.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 12 June 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/amsterdam-plants-mini-gardens-around-bins-in-drive-to-cut-littering#img-1.

Xhienne. “SWOT Analysis.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 May 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis#/media/File:SWOT_en.svg.

Images for examples in different contexts source information:

Samoilov, Yuri. “Coronavirus.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 20 Mar. 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ya2ngksd. CC BY 2.0

Webster, Tony. “Plastic Bottles - Waste.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 16 Sept. 2012, www.flickr.com/photos/87296837@N00/7992944072. CC BY 2.0

XoMEoX. “Tree.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 28 May 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y8bw46ns. CC BY 2.0