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Steering Your Brain Toward Better Program Ideas

This is a post about asking good questions whenever you think you have a good idea for a program or program improvement. You probably knew that great ideas still need to be examined, questioned if you please. That's what this post is about, sort of.

Mostly, I want to offer a few comments on Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas by Kevin and Shawn Coyne. Brainsteering offers a disciplined approach to asking, and answering, questions about product ideas and business ideas. The process also works just fine for program ideas.

The book starts by describing some generic questions to ask about a challenge then goes into creating logic trees. A logic tree works by stating a question and breaking it down into subquestions. Simply asking and answering questions might lead to some valuable new ideas.

Brainsteering

And that's as far as I have gone in the book. I can say that there is a chapter on making your own brainstorming efforts more effective. Other chapters cover ways to conduct brainsteering exercises in groups and one chapter on implementing ideas.

The logic tree and the three-step process for evaluating new program ideas make this book worth a look if you are interested in starting or improving a program. Brainsteering will also help if you have an idea for a new nonprofit. Will your idea really fly? Asking and answering the right questions is critical to finding out how good your idea really is. also offers some tips for using analysis to find or evaluate ideas. Studying data and case studies could be enough to lead to a new idea. Analysis also serves the more common purpose of helping you evaluate an idea. The Coyne brothers offer a three-step analytical approach to evaluating a new idea. Though the example they use is a business idea, the same process could easily work on nonprofit program ideas.
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