Taking Time to Think by Rands in Response
Rands in Response has a great post indeed called Taking Time to Think. You should read it in full but I will try to summarize the general idea here.
First for the sake of the idea, imagine you have two half-brains, something that is actually very true. One half is the creative one, which is your source for inspiration, thriving on new ideas. It needs to soak these up, get new ones, not constraint by time or place and never done. But it cannot be timed because of that and hence not plannable and budgetable.
The other half is the reactive one, with ingrained routines, being very swift on its feet in light of familiar problems and loving it when the sky is falling. You need to balance the two.
Your world is full of problems that you need to react to and hence you need to free up time to think. Going offsite will not happen often enough, so Rands suggests that you will need to free up time for it. Two meetings would be an idea, each week, one being a brainstorm, and another being there to make a prototype. They should be a few days apart. The meetings need to be in your headquarters as this is where you have to allow people to think too and the prototype will allow you to not forget.
As learned during my creativity course, you can’t structure thinking but you can’t leave it totally unstructured either. That’s really the general brainstorming idea. Diverge and Converge, do it apart, but do it swiftly. Free people and bring them together again. You can’t invite everyone but need the right people on the team, those that will bring the cause further and those that will bring in a diverse background all the same.
The people you invite need to be the ones that can live in a new land and not compare it to the old. Your ideas need to develop. This can be enforced by rules though in that you can’t compare in the brainstorming meeting and possibly only use old ideas and previous code in the prototyping meeting.
Take 5 hot topics into the brainstorming meeting, something that the reactive brain couldn’t react to, and add to that a bit of high level ideas that are far on the horizon. The prototpye can be code or just clearer lists. The idea is to document the previous ideas, not too specifically, just basic.
An important item to remember is that all this take time. You will feel pain, you will have big questions rising up. Your design should be getting better bit by bit though and with that your todo list should be shrinking. With that I mean the unresolved items todo list. Some time you need to cut of the list and clear the features. The meetings will have to tackle a really bad problem each and every time. Slowly they die off and you are going into development of the new system.
In the process you have created a culture of thinking. Congratulations.