AKA:  Braintrusting for Fun and Profit

If you’re a true brainiac – a statistical genius – your IQ will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 140.  If you’re more average, your IQ will fall between 90 and 120.  Einstein’s IQ was 163.

In order to choose your ideal micro-business, you’re going to need to gather all the smarts possible – all of the IQ points you can get your arms around.  Of course, your IQ and mine don’t vary much with education or mental exercise.  There’s not much we can do to crank up our actual, personal IQ.

But we can amass more IQ if we add the IQs of other people around us.  For example, in ideal circumstances, if we put ten people in a room and came up with a collective IQ of 1,000 or more wouldn’t we be tons smarter than just you or me?  It isn’t quite that simple, but the basic idea works.  In an open, safe environment, you can grow your practical IQ by adding up the intelligence, the life experience and the perspectives of the people around you.  Thing is, most of us never do that.  We rarely ask, much less listen to other peoples’ opinions.  Gathering input is something that most people avoid.

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There are ways to gather smarts that work and ways to gather smarts that don’t work.  For instance, if you stuff a bunch of people in a room and ask them to shout out their opinions and you listen to the loudest, that’s probably a good way to go deaf, but not an effective way to get smarter.  There are better ways of accumulating more intelligence.  

Let’s say that you both have 100 IQ points.  From now on, we’ll be using the term “IQ” very loosely – to include life experience, opinions, etc., not just raw intelligence.  

With two people, each with 100 IQ points, you’ll actually share some of the same wisdom, common sense and general opinion of the world.  Let’s say that the other person is the janitor that cleans your building, so you think you’re much totally different.  Not so.  We actually share a lot of the same basic wisdom.  For example, both you and the janitor know that it’d be a bad idea to spray paint a kitty cat in your advertising.  See?  There’s a lot of wisdom that you’ll share with almost anyone.

You’re both human beings, you’re both Americans (residents of the U.S., at least,) and you’re both living in the early 2000s.  You have a lot in common, but there are a lot of differences, too.  Maybe you’re a different sex.  Maybe you’re a Republican and the Janitor hates George Bush.  Most often, we assume that people think more similarly to us than they actually do.  During Braintrusting, we’re usually shocked by the differences of opinion.

Considering the similarities and the differences, let’s say you both share 50 points.  That leaves YOU with 50 IQ points that the Janitor doesn’t have and it leaves the JANITOR with 50 IQ points that you don’t have. Add them up and you have 150 IQ points in the room.

“Ahh.” You may say.  “There’s a fly in your ointment. What if the Janitor is a real dummy and I’m really smart?  What if I know everything the Janitor knows and then some?”

“Thank you for proving my point,” I’d reply with unctuous superiority (and thereby prove that even I don’t really “get” the exercise of Braintrusting.)

In both of our cases, we’re operating under the assumptions that:

1.    There is only one valuable way of being smart:  MY way.
2.    The other person isn’t remotely as smart as me.

In our quietest thoughts, almost all of us think this about six hundred times a day.  The Venn diagram in our minds looks like this:

I have, like, ONE ZILLION “IQ” points because I really like the way I think.  I’m smart at the stuff that matters and I don’t care about the stuff where I’m not so smart.  When it comes to the Janitor, or most everyone else, I’m pretty sure that everything THEY know can be circumscribed within the vast circle of stuff I already know.  In other words, I know everything the Janitor knows and then some.

That’s our quietest thoughts, which are the territory controlled by our pal, the human ego.  In our out-loud thoughts, though, we would probably agree that the Janitor knows a lot of stuff that we don’t know and that the Janitor probably has a very different perspective on stuff like OUR FREAKING BUSINESS.  In a lot of ways, the Janitor is a lot more like our target customer than we are.  Hmmm.

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If you’re willing to entertain the possibility that the Janitor – or anyone else – has interesting smarts to deliver to a conversation about your business, then you’ve opened the door to BIG SMARTS.  If you have access to a hundred-point-IQ janitor, then you just went from average to almost genius-level thinking!  And that’s with only TWO people in the room.  What if you gathered TEN people in a room?  With that many brains in your “Braintrust,” you can bring to bear a cumulative IQ far bigger than Einstein’s, and your decisions will be that much smarter.

Granted, the Janitor may be an extreme example.  But you have tons of people in your life who care about you, care about your business and offer very differing perspectives from yours.  Braintrusting is about harnessing their IQ and putting it to work for your business.  Here’s what a room with ten people can look like:

                                                   

Of course, having ten people in a room doesn’t guarantee intelligence, especially if there’s alcohol involved.  In fact, there are many ways to make a roomful of people (or an email list) dumb, but these mistakes can be avoided:

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• Don’t fill the group with people who think like you do.  Fill the group with people who are inclined to disagree with you and your life perspective.  
• Don’t invite just “smart” people into the group.  It doesn’t really matter how smart the participants are so long as they have different perspectives and interesting viewpoints.  After all, your customers won’t be any smarter than the average person, so why get smart people to tell you how your average customers will feel about your Micro-business?  
• Don’t lead with your opinion.  In fact, keep your opinion to yourself.
• Don’t ask loaded questions.  “Do you think my idea of starting a cat tattooing business is a good idea?  I think it’s kind of cool.”  The way you ask questions can definitely skew your results.  Ask questions without revealing your own biases or the biases of anyone else.
• Don’t set anyone up as the authority in the group.  “James, the multimillionaire, says that I should invest in real estate.  What do you think?”  One high-profile person can easily override the IQ of the rest of the group.

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• Do load your group up with people who think like your future customers.  If you think you might be selling to homeowners, because eight-out-of-ten of your business ideas have something to do with home improvement, then load your group with people who own homes.
• Do conduct a lot of “votes” where your group will have the chance to choose among many options.  Conduct these votes via email, Twitter, Facebook or other mediums where you can keep your biases out of the equation.  Do your best to keep people from seeing how other people in the Braintrust are voting.  Do everything in your power to get “first-blush” opinions from your group.
• Do listen carefully to all of the feedback and opinions that are offered.  Who cares what you think?  You should spend one 100% of your time asking questions and 0% of your talk-time offering your opinion.
• Do be grateful to your Braintrust for helping you!

Once you’ve built up your cumulative IQ by creating a Braintrust of a dozen people or so, ask them what businesses they think you should put on your Top Ten List.  Your Braintrust folks may know you even better than you know yourself. So, let ‘em rip!  Write down all their ideas and go back later to determine which ones should be in your Top Ten List.

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