To develop more innovative ideas, we have to stop using conventional  right brain/left brain brainstorming techniques.

The reason?  Nobel-prize winning neuroscientists have found that the big “ahas” come from a model of the brain called “intelligent memory.”  When we learn something new our brains connect it with what’s already in our memory bank. When different pieces combine  into a new pattern we have an “aha” insight flash.

This scientific finding means that we need to develop alternative ways to traditional brainstorming.

Just as the intelligent memory concept has replaced the old two-sided brain theory in neuroscience, companies need to replace brainstorming with methods that reflect more accurately how creative ideas actually form in the mind,” writes Columbia Business School professor William Duggan in “How Aha! Really Happens” in the winter issue of Strategy and Business.

Over the past 18 months I’ve been using several new strategic ideation and problem-solving approaches  based on intelligent memory with much success.  Although I must confess corporate clients initially feel uncomfortable and wary with these new approaches because they are so different from traditional  “brainstorming sessions.”

Some of the elements that I find very effective in helping clients find the “aha insights”:

• Reflecting on previous experiences and why they worked. This relaxes people, gets them off of  focusing on the problem at hand.  During a one or two-day session I ask people to look at these patterns of past success and what they might mean. Inevitably helpful connections are made.

• Forgoing a logical order: I use exercises and conversations that seem to wander in order to help people wander through possibilities and previous experiences.  Wandering results in far more significant outcomes than a straight path.  Often someone will ask, “where is this going? Are we going to be able to come up with ideas to our situation today.”  About half-way through the day, they begin to see the magic of taking a non-linear route.

• The art of good questions: being asked provocative, unusual questions is one of the best ways to trigger thinking and conversations that lead somewhere. I joke, though seriously, with friends that my questions are my art.  The most challenging part of guiding people to “aha’ insights is asking questions that open, deepen, and often explode thinking. Questions that tap into what they know in unusual ways, breaking lose new patterns and connections.

• Photos, superpowers and metaphors: other techniques that tap into the intelligent memory is the use of photos, superhero superpowers, and metaphors to see, frame and understand situations in unusual new ways  — ways needed to connect new dots. Again, people often wonder what the heck I’m doing to their heads using these approaches.

• Avoid conference rooms! Working in conference rooms is an energy killer, especially if sitting at a conference room table.  It’s so stultifying that I no longer will do collaborative workshops in this format. Far better to have a big room, some chairs you can move around, lots of wall space for sticking up ideas.

• Do we really need to spend all day?: People spend so much time doing strategic analysis and developing strategic plans and allot so little for thinking.  Yet if you don’t have the strategic ideas, the planning is for naught. There’s some weird feeling that spending a day  thinking is wasting time.  Clients often ask, “Do we really need to spend five hours? Couldn’t we do it in two?”  Well, no. The way the brain works it takes at least two hours to mentally get into a place where your brain is relaxed enough to actually think creatively and begin to make the types of new connections that give you that brilliant flash of insight.  If you really want to tap into collective brilliance. If you really want ideas that will make a difference, chunk out some time and chill. I like to use the advice  from a consultant who helps  high-powered attorneys  improve their performance:  “don’t just do something, sit there.”

So as you look at innovation and problem solving, look for new ways that tap into the true science of the brain and say goodbye to traditional brainstorming. It just won’t get you where you want to go fast enough because of the way our brains are wired.

As William Duggan writes:

“Eventually, we can expect more techniques based on the new science of intelligent memory to replace methods from the previous paradigm. Companies that get there first will have a distinct advantage. What innovation does your company use, and in which paradigm do they fit, the old view of the mind or the new?