Brainstorming Success!

Tips for a very effective brainstorming session.

How do you lead your team through an effective brainstorming session? By setting some simple guidelines.

First, remind everyone of these very simple but effective ground rules for great brainstorming (you can even post them on a flip chart, if it helps):

• No discussion or judgement of ideas until later.
• All ideas, even absurd or impractical, are welcome.
• Quantity of ideas is the major objective, since it leads to quality
• Build on ideas of others
• Everyone participates; don’t hold back

Second, you give everyone the opportunity to think individually about the problem for one minute - and capture their own ideas on individual sticky note pads (one idea per note). This eliminates the oft-detested role of reluctant flip chart scribe. In addition, even if the team idea writer were inclined to capture all of the ideas, the typical person can’t write fast enough; something that slows down the creative energy in the room. This has the benefit of having many ideas ready to post after one minute - and lots of inspiration for people to build on the ideas of others.

Want some other creative problem-solving, brainstorming techniques? Check out my other posts on mind mapping and brain writing.

The next step in the creative problem-solving process is to evaluate the ideas and select the top solutions to recommend for implementation. I always suggest that teams take at least a 10-minute break between idea generation and evaluation. It’s even better if you can take a break of a few days, for two reasons:

(1) A delay keeps you from choosing an easy, recognizable solution. It causes you to stop action and explore the options further.

(2) It is difficult for most people to generate their best ideas on the spot within the X number of minutes allotted to this brainstorming session, which becomes especially true if no one sent out information in advance to stoke creative juices.

If you ask the members of your team when they got their best ideas, they will likely say that it was not under the pressure of the buzzer. Most people’s best ideas show up overnight, in the shower, or driving in to work. It is a myth that pressure enhances creativity.

But what if the team doesn’t have time for a longer break of a couple of days? There needs to at least be a few minutes break before people start telling you that your baby (the idea you just generated) is ugly.

I will share some simple approaches here, and then discuss more involved evaluation tools (i.e., impact vs. effort grid; decision matrix) in separate blog posts.

The important thing is to have clear criteria upon which all can agree and understand for making the evaluation, and your team needs to identify these before you start discussing the ideas. This makes it much more objective when some ideas are not selected for implementation (or at least for execution at this time).

After the decision criteria are clear to the participants, each person selects their top three to five ideas and writes down their rationale for choosing them. Conduct a round-robin to let everyone hear the top choices and corresponding rationale, and capture these ideas on a flip chart.

In my next post, we’ll discuss what to do with these ideas once you’ve collected them.