Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath

The average individual brainstormer came up with 30 percent of the best solutions, which is pretty good for a solo effort. Here’s what’s not so good: The brainstormers confidently predicted that they’d identified 75 percent of the best ideas. (We all know people who believe that the world’s accumulated wisdom only adds an incremental 25 percent to their own contribution. You may have married one of them.) A checklist could have helped these people. Imagine if you’d provided them with a list of “solution categories” to guide their thinking, reminding them to think about “solutions that raise the cost of parking” and “solutions that help more cars park in the same amount of space” and so on. That list would have served the same role as Cisco’s acquisition categories; it would have sparked their thinking and kept them from forgetting key areas of consideration.