Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
  • Reliability.fm
    • Speaking Of Reliability
    • Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast
    • Quality during Design
    • Way of the Quality Warrior
    • Critical Talks
    • Dare to Know
    • Maintenance Disrupted
    • Metal Conversations
    • The Leadership Connection
    • Practical Reliability Podcast
    • Reliability Matters
    • Reliability it Matters
    • Maintenance Mavericks Podcast
    • Women in Maintenance
    • Accendo Reliability Webinar Series
  • Articles
    • CRE Preparation Notes
    • on Leadership & Career
      • Advanced Engineering Culture
      • Engineering Leadership
      • Managing in the 2000s
      • Product Development and Process Improvement
    • on Maintenance Reliability
      • Aasan Asset Management
      • AI & Predictive Maintenance
      • Asset Management in the Mining Industry
      • CMMS and Reliability
      • Conscious Asset
      • EAM & CMMS
      • Everyday RCM
      • History of Maintenance Management
      • Life Cycle Asset Management
      • Maintenance and Reliability
      • Maintenance Management
      • Plant Maintenance
      • Process Plant Reliability Engineering
      • ReliabilityXperience
      • RCM Blitz®
      • Rob’s Reliability Project
      • The Intelligent Transformer Blog
      • The People Side of Maintenance
      • The Reliability Mindset
    • on Product Reliability
      • Accelerated Reliability
      • Achieving the Benefits of Reliability
      • Apex Ridge
      • Metals Engineering and Product Reliability
      • Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics
      • Product Validation
      • Reliability Engineering Insights
      • Reliability in Emerging Technology
    • on Risk & Safety
      • CERM® Risk Insights
      • Equipment Risk and Reliability in Downhole Applications
      • Operational Risk Process Safety
    • on Systems Thinking
      • Communicating with FINESSE
      • The RCA
    • on Tools & Techniques
      • Big Data & Analytics
      • Experimental Design for NPD
      • Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability
      • Inside and Beyond HALT
      • Inside FMEA
      • Integral Concepts
      • Learning from Failures
      • Progress in Field Reliability?
      • R for Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Using Python
      • Reliability Reflections
      • Testing 1 2 3
      • The Manufacturing Academy
  • eBooks
  • Resources
    • Accendo Authors
    • FMEA Resources
    • Feed Forward Publications
    • Openings
    • Books
    • Webinars
    • Journals
    • Higher Education
    • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • 14 Ways to Acquire Reliability Engineering Knowledge
    • Reliability Analysis Methods online course
    • Measurement System Assessment
    • SPC-Process Capability Course
    • Design of Experiments
    • Foundations of RCM online course
    • Quality during Design Journey
    • Reliability Engineering Statistics
    • Quality Engineering Statistics
    • An Introduction to Reliability Engineering
    • Reliability Engineering for Heavy Industry
    • An Introduction to Quality Engineering
    • Process Capability Analysis course
    • Root Cause Analysis and the 8D Corrective Action Process course
    • Return on Investment online course
    • CRE Preparation Online Course
    • Quondam Courses
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Live Events
  • Calendar
    • Call for Papers Listing
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Webinar Calendar
  • Login
    • Member Home

by Dianna Deeney Leave a Comment

QDD 092 Ways to Gather Ideas with a Team

Ways to Gather Ideas with a Team

Sometimes we need to gather with our team and come up with some ideas, whether we’re looking for new product ideas, trying to discover possible solutions, or we need to improve a service.

Gathering a team to come up with ideas is common. What are some of the ways we approach this activity? We talk about systematic and structured methods and new approaches to brainstorming.

 

View the Episode Transcript

Trying different methods with our team can help us think in different ways and open up new tracks of possibilities.


Some new things to try:

Systematic Inventive Thinking / Closed World

Other Quality during Design podcast episode about Systematic Inventive thinking: Need to innovate? Stop brainstorming and try a systematic approach.

Change our focus to failures

Other QDD podcast about FMEA. What do we do with FMEA early in design concept?

Change our goal from finding solutions to asking questions

Gregersen, Hal. “Better Brainstorming: Focus on questions, not answers, for breakthrough insights.” Harvard Business Review. March 2018. hbr.org/2018/03/better-brainstorming, Accessed: 3 Jan 2023.

Use design heuristics

www.designheuristics.com/

Other QDD podcast about TRIZ: Get Unstuck: Expand and Contract Our Problem

Structured problem-solving techniques to help us focus on investigating first (PDSA, PDCA, DMAIC)

Other QDD episode about these methods: How to Choose the Right Improvement Model

Brainstorming

We’ll talk more about this in the next post.


 

Episode Transcript

Sometimes we need to gather with our team and come up with some ideas, whether we’re looking for new product ideas, trying to discover possible solutions, or we need to improve a service. Gathering a team to come up with ideas is common. What are some of the ways we approach this activity? We talk about systematic and structured methods and new approaches to brainstorming.

Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products, others love for less. Each week we talk about ways to use quality during design, engineering, and product development. My name is Dianna Deeney. I’m a senior level quality, professional, and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. Listen in and then join us. Visit quality during design.com.

Do you know what 12 things you should have before a design concept makes it to the engineering drawing board where you’re setting specifications. I’ve got a free checklist for you and you can do some assessments of your own. Where do you stack up with the checklist? You can log into a learning portal to access the checklist and an introduction to more information about how to get those 12 things. To get this free information, just sign up at qualityduringdesign.com. On the homepage, there’s a link in the middle of the page. Just click it and say, I want it.

In this episode, I wanted to review some of the ways that we generate ideas in new product development. There’s a lot of academic studies about how engineers do design and how cross-functional teams work together, so let’s review some of those ideas and some of the baseline activities that we do maybe daily as engineers in new product development.

We’re sort of familiar with some structure, even though we’re asked to be creative and come up with some innovative solutions. So it’s not uncommon or out of the way for us to think of being innovative within a systematic inventive thinking or a closed world thinking. And this systematic approach is something that was introduced through the book Inside the Box, a proven system of creativity and breakthrough results written by Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg. A main takeaway from this method is to constrain ourselves when we’re trying to come up with novel, innovative ideas to change from thinking that anything’s possible to what can we do with what we’ve got as engineering at work? We do this all the time. We’re working within constraints, especially when we’re trying to solve a problem, and there’s some structured techniques with this approach. The authors came up with um, five templates for innovation, which are different ways that we can create or build our closed world. So for example, we can start subtracting things from whatever it is we’re working with or trying to innovate. We can divide it with a division technique or multiply it, and those are just a few of the techniques that they use when working with groups to come up with new ideas. They have case studies and examples of all of these techniques in their book, and I covered this in a previous podcast episode, which I’ll link to. I experience this all the time, not just in engineering, but it’s almost like hobby of mine. I look at what it is I have and what can I make out of it. What kind of new thing can I cobble together to create something new and useful? I’ve created outdoor sinks and garden steps and fancy pen enclosures for just some of the more fun activities that I’ve done are just around the house. So thinking this way when it comes to new product design doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch.

Another thing we can do to develop ideas with our group is to change our focus from finding the best solution and look at other things. For example, we could look at failures. What are all the ways this could go wrong? In fact, that’s what the first course in the quality during design journey is all about. Designing for problems and risk. We can take a high level approach to problems with our greater cross-functional team to unlock new ideas about our product. Not only does this shift a viewpoint to look at failures, help us with some innovative ideas and to fix problems, we can also take this information and start evaluating risk with it – feed that information into F M E A failure mode effects analysis for which we can use for all sorts of things throughout the new development project. If you were thinking F M E A before I even said it, you have to message me and let me know that.

Another way that we can change focus from finding the best solution is instead of trying to come up with answers, we can brainstorm for questions. We can gather a small group and define our problem at a high level, set the clock for four minutes and generate as many questions and only questions as we can. We don’t want to start answering the questions or trying to solve the questions that we’re coming up with, and we wanna aim to produce at least 15 questions and then study them. Pursuing one of these questions to find an answer is likely to lead us down a path that has a solution that we just didn’t expect. This is something that other people have had success with. I’ll link to an article that gets into a bit more detail about using questions as the focus.

Something else we can do to generate ideas is design heuristics. There are common things that design engineers do to create new things. We can work in a team of people with a few heuristics to come up with a novel idea. The website designheuristics.com, host cards that have 77 design heuristics for design concept development. They differentiate this a little bit from TRIZ, the theory of inventive thinking, which we also talked about in a previous podcast episode. The idea is that you would gather a small group with three of these design heuristics and see if your group can develop a new idea based on those heuristics.

There’s also structured problem solving techniques and improvement models like the P D S A plan do Study Act or the P D C A and DM A I C defined measure, analyze, improve, and control, and they are all based on the scientific method. These provide some team activity structure to move us from idea to implementation where instead of just flying into ideas we’re first detectives in doing investigative work.

Within those structured problem solving techniques, we can do brainstorming. In that previous podcast episode about systematic inventive thinking, it’s called, “Need to innovate? Stop brainstorming and try a systematic approach”, and that’s where I reviewed the book “Inside the Box” and included what the critics say about brainstorming. In next week’s episode, we’re going to be interviewing and talking with somebody that uses brainstorming in new product development. We’re going to talk about best practices for brainstorming in general, but what I especially liked about talking with this guest is her approach to common brainstorming issues. We acknowledge that they’re there and let’s come up with a defensive plan against those issues. We touch on silent brainstorming and teaming, or breaking down the group into smaller groups. She also has a lot of advice about planning for a brainstorming session so that we can get the most out of it, and she shares the success that she’s had, which I gotta admit is pretty impressive.

We’ll be getting more into brainstorming as a way to come up with ideas with a team in next week’s episode. Looking ahead to episodes, following that, we’re going to be diving a bit into how to clean up after the storm, ways to organize, select, or screen that information that we’ve generated to make it more manageable and useful so we can devise those action items from that.

What’s today’s insight to action? There are many ways that we can generate ideas and come up with novel innovations with our greater cross-functional team. Many times they follow a structured team approach. Even brainstorming has some structure and facilitation involved with it. I think any one of these methods would probably work for our team to create innovative ideas. To do the same thing over and over again- it gets old. And the ideas that the team generates from using that same method over and over again – it can get stale. So we can mix it up and try something different. Maybe we’ll generate the next great novel idea and our team can start off with some success.

If you like this topic or the content in this episode, there’s much more on our website, including information about how to join our signature coaching program. The quality during design journey consistency is important, so subscribe to the Weekly newsletter. This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. Thanks for listening.

 

Filed Under: Quality during Design

About Dianna Deeney

Dianna is a senior-level Quality Professional and an experienced engineer. She has worked over 20 years in product manufacturing and design and is active in learning about the latest techniques in business.

Dianna promotes strategic use of quality tools and techniques throughout the design process.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Quality during Design podcast logo

Tips for using quality tools and methods to help you design products others love, for less.


by Dianna Deeney
Quality during Design,
Hosted on Buzzsprout.com
Subscribe and enjoy every episode
Google
Apple
Spotify

Recent Episodes

QDD 128 Leveraging Proven Frameworks or Concept Development

QDD 127 Understanding Cross-Functional Collaboration

QDD 126 Exploring the Problem Space: A Key Principle for Robust Product Design and Project Success

QDD 125 Exploring Product Development and AI Through Literature

QDD 124 Design for User Tasks using an Urgent/Important Matrix

QDD 123 Information Development in Design, with Scott Abel – Part 2 (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 122 Information Development in Design, with Scott Abel – Part 1 (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 121 Crafting Effective Technical Documents for the Engineering Field

QDD 120 How to use FMEA for Complaint Investigation

QDD 119 Results-Driven Decisions, Faster: Accelerated Stress Testing as a Reliability Life Test

QDD 118 Journey from Production to Consumption: Enhancing Product Reliability

QDD 117 QDD Redux: Choose Reliability Goals for Modules

QDD 116 Reliability Engineering during Design, with Adam Bahret (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 115 QDD Redux: 5 Options to Manage Risks during Product Engineering

QDD 114 The Instant Glory of Projects

QDD 113 What to do about Virtual Meetings

QDD 112 QDD Redux: How to self-advocate for more customer face time (and why it’s important)

QDD 111 Engineering with Receptivity, with Sol Rosenbaum (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 110 Don’t Wish for Cross-Functional Buy-in on Product Designs – Plan to Get It!

QDD 109 Before You Start Engineering Solutions, Do This

QDD 108 QDD Redux Ep. 4: Statistical vs. Practical Significance

QDD 107 QDD Redux Ep. 3: When it’s Not Normal: How to Choose from a Library of Distributions

QDD 106 QDD Redux Ep. 2: How to Handle Competing Failure Modes

QDD 105 QDD Redux Ep. 1: How Many Do We Need to Test?

QDD 104 The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering

QDD 103 What to do for Effective and Efficient Working Meetings

QDD 102 Get Design Inputs with Flowcharts

QDD 101 Quality Tools are Legos of Development (and Their 7 Uses)

QDD 100 Lessons Learned from Coffee Pod Stories

QDD 099 Crucial Conversations in Engineering, with Shere Tuckey (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 098 Challenges Getting Team Input in Concept Development

QDD 097 Brainstorming within Design Sprints

QDD 096 After the ‘Storm: Compare and Prioritize Ideas

QDD 095 After the ‘Storm: Pareto Voting and Screening Methods

QDD 094 After the ‘Storm: Group and Explore Ideas

QDD 093 Product Design with Brainstorming, with Emily Haidemenos (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts)

QDD 092 Ways to Gather Ideas with a Team

QDD 091 The Spirits of Technical Writing Past, Present, and Future

QDD 090 The Gifts Others Bring

QDD 089 Next Steps after Surprising Test Results

QDD 088 Choose Reliability Goals for Modules

QDD 087 Start a System Architecture Diagram Early

QDD 086 Why Yield Quality in the Front-End of Product Development

QDD 085 Book Cast

QDD 084 Engineering in the Color Economy

QDD 083 Getting to Great Designs

QDD 082 Get Clarity on Goals with a Continuum

QDD 081 Variable Relationships: Correlation and Causation

QDD 080 Use Meetings to Add Productivity

QDD 079 Ways to Partner with Test Engineers

QDD 078 What do We do with FMEA Early in Design Concept?

QDD 077 A Severity Scale based on Quality Dimensions

QDD 076 Use Force Field Analysis to Understand Nuances

QDD 075 Getting Use Information without a Prototype

QDD 074 Finite Element Analysis (FEA) Supplements Test

QDD 073 2 Lessons about Remote Work for Design Engineers

QDD 072 Always Plot the Data

QDD 071 Supplier Control Plans and Design Specs

QDD 070 Use FMEA to Design for In-Process Testing

QDD 069 Use FMEA to Choose Critical Design Features

QDD 068 Get Unstuck: Expand and Contract Our Problem

QDD 067 Get Unstuck: Reframe our Problem

QDD 066 5 Options to Manage Risks during Product Engineering

QDD 065 Prioritizing Technical Requirements with a House of Quality

QDD 064 Gemba for Product Design Engineering

QDD 063 Product Design from a Data Professional Viewpoint, with Gabor Szabo (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts)

QDD 062 How Does Reliability Engineering Affect (Not Just Assess) Design?

QDD 061 How to use FMEA for Complaint Investigation

QDD 060 3 Tips for Planning Design Reviews

QDD 059 Product Design from a Marketing Viewpoint, with Laura Krick (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts)

QDD 058 UFMEA vs. DFMEA

QDD 057 Design Input & Specs vs. Test & Measure Capability

QDD 056 ALT vs. HALT

QDD 055 Quality as a Strategic Asset vs. Quality as a Control

QDD 054 Design Specs vs. Process Control, Capability, and SPC

QDD 053 Internal Customers vs. External Customers

QDD 052 Discrete Data vs. Continuous Data

QDD 051 Prevention Controls vs. Detection Controls

QDD 050 Try this Method to Help with Complex Decisions (DMRCS)

QDD 049 Overlapping Ideas: Quality, Reliability, and Safety

QDD 048 Using SIPOC to Get Started

QDD 047 Risk Barriers as Swiss Cheese?

QDD 046 Environmental Stress Testing for Robust Designs

QDD 045 Choosing a Confidence Level for Test using FMEA

QDD 044 Getting Started with FMEA – It All Begins with a Plan

QDD 043 How can 8D help Solve my Recurring Problem?

QDD 042 Mistake-Proofing – The Poka-Yoke of Usability

QDD 041 Getting Comfortable with using Reliability Results

QDD 040 How to Self-Advocate for More Customer Face Time (and why it’s important)

QDD 039 Choosing Quality Tools (Mind Map vs. Flowchart vs. Spaghetti Diagram)

QDD 038 The DFE Part of DFX (Design For Environment and eXcellence)

QDD 037 Results-Driven Decisions, Faster: Accelerated Stress Testing as a Reliability Life Test

QDD 036 When to use DOE (Design of Experiments)?

QDD 035 Design for User Tasks using an Urgent/Important Matrix

QDD 034 Statistical vs. Practical Significance

QDD 033 How Many Do We Need To Test?

QDD 032 Life Cycle Costing for Product Design Choices

QDD 031 5 Aspects of Good Reliability Goals and Requirements

QDD 030 Using Failure Rate Functions to Drive Early Design Decisions

QDD 029 Types of Design Analyses possible with User Process Flowcharts

QDD 028 Design Tolerances Based on Economics (Using the Taguchi Loss Function)

QDD 027 How Many Controls do we Need to Reduce Risk?

QDD 026 Solving Symptoms Instead of Causes?

QDD 025 Do you have SMART ACORN objectives?

QDD 024 Why Look to Standards

QDD 023 Getting the Voice of the Customer

QDD 022 The Way We Test Matters

QDD 021 Designing Specs for QA

QDD 020 Every Failure is a Gift

QDD 019 Understanding the Purposes behind Kaizen

QDD 018 Fishbone Diagram: A Supertool to Understand Problems, Potential Solutions, and Goals

QDD 017 What is ‘Production Equivalent’ and Why Does it Matter?

QDD 016 About Visual Quality Standards

QDD 015 Using the Pareto Principle and Avoiding Common Pitfalls

QDD 014 The Who’s Who of your Quality Team

QDD 013 When it’s Not Normal: How to Choose from a Library of Distributions

QDD 012 What are TQM, QFD, Six Sigma, and Lean?

QDD 011 The Designer’s Important Influence on Monitoring After Launch

QDD 010 How to Handle Competing Failure Modes

QDD 009 About Using Slide Decks for Technical Design Reviews

QDD 008 Remaking Risk-Based Decisions: Allowing Ourselves to Change our Minds.

QDD 007 Need to innovate? Stop brainstorming and try a systematic approach.

QDD 006 HALT! Watch out for that weakest link

QDD 005 The Designer’s Risk Analysis affects Business, Projects, and Suppliers

QDD 004 A big failure and too many causes? Try this analysis.

QDD 003 Why Your Design Inputs Need to Include Quality & Reliability

QDD 002 My product works. Why don’t they want it?

QDD 001 How to Choose the Right Improvement Model

Join Accendo

Receive information and updates about articles and many other resources offered by Accendo Reliability by becoming a member.

It’s free and only takes a minute.

Join Today

© 2025 FMS Reliability · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Cookies Policy