10 Best Practices to get the best output in virtual brainstorming sessions
At BYJU’S, we conduct brainstorming sessions involving all designers to diverge on all possible ideas for different problem statements/ hypotheses. This is a strictly time-bound activity. We finally prioritize on few ideas among these and implement them.
Best Practices
After trying out many, here are some of our favorite practices we use to get the maximum productivity out of the session
1) Give Context — Before Session
Not every designer is an instantaneous thinker so giving early context, gives enough time for all members to be prepared before attending the session. This can derive the best output for every person involved. Without this, some designers might spend too much time understanding context during ideation and might get stuck and not generate a good number of ideas.
You can give context at the start of the day when you are planning for the session. This can be like an announcement poster or simple doc where u put context in a crisp way, if you send a big document or PRD to read on, no one will read.
Tip: You can make like an announcement or invitation kind of poster which gives context also
2) Setting up the right context-Start of the Session
Setting the right context makes sure everyone is on the same line and tackling the same problem. This will make sure most of the ideas are usable and impactful. Without this, people can take the problem statement in a different way and start putting ideas that are not really related to the exact problem statement.
Tip: We often keep relevant images next to the hypothesis so that people can feel more empathetic to problems we are dealing with
3) Time-Bound Ideation — During Session
Ideation in general is never-ending. While nobody likes to be rushed (especially when trying to solve an urgent problem), it is important to get the best results. If people are given lots of time to think, they will do exactly that. They will think …and think …and think. But we don’t want participants to merely think. We want them to write down their ideas! We want as many ideas as possible.
4) Reverse the thought of “quality over quantity” -During Session
The main idea of brainstorming is to generate as many different ideas as possible. Making it very clear during the session will make sure we get different directions/ different ways to solve a problem. If we focus on quality, we might end up with fewer ideas to pick from and miss out on ideas that may have a higher impact and less effort required. So we encourage people to not go in-depth about an idea and mainly think of different ideas/directions.
5) Avoid Judgements — During Session
Not judging the ideas of the team involved will make sure every member is thinking freely and radically. This can give u direction that you might never think of. Avoid saying ‘Oh that is a bad idea,’ ‘but that cannot happen’ etc.. instead, encourage people to build on top of them, by saying, ‘that sounds great, but how about this. You should let out people think freely.
6) Make it Anonymous — During Session
The main essence of this session is to think out loud and put down whatever comes to ur mind. Certain apprehensions like “What if the idea is bad?” “What if others judge me?” kind of things shouldn’t stop them to put in their ideas. Make these exercises anonymous will make people go crazy and put all radical ideas they are getting. In the initial days when we are brainstorming in FIGJAM, we kept different color sticky notes to different folks so that they can put their ideas in their own space. But later, we removed the colors and annotations so that no one knows who wrote what. When we had a discussion post-session, people mentioned they felt more comfortable.
7) Break out Rooms — During Session
Interactivity/Participation of people in smaller groups is higher in smaller groups than in larger groups. Smaller groups will give more comfort to participants to speak out or express or ideate together. In bigger groups, people might not be comfortable speaking out even though they have few ideas. When we do brainstorming sessions we often break out into two teams, where one person in the other team also has the same context as the person conducting. This will make people more comfortable speaking up or discussing stuff when ideating. This is mostly applicable if the number of people involved is more than 5 or so
8) Build on other people’s ideas-During Session
Often an idea suggested by one person can trigger a bigger and/or better idea by another person. Or a variation of an idea on the board could be the next “velcro” idea. It is this building of ideas that leads to out-of-the-box thinking and fantastic ideas. This can avoid people getting stuck or getting saturated. Through breakout rooms, we encourage smaller groups to have discussions and ideate together.
9) Refreshment Breaks — Mid of Session
Refreshment helps in getting maximum productivity even towards the end of the session. Brainstorming is a very intense exercise, people can feel burned out after 2–3 different hypothesis ideation. When we are ideating, we do these refreshment breaks where we go and watch some exciting content on youtube, etc. This will help in refreshing minds before we move to the next steps. You can keep some videos ready instead of searching then and there or you can play Pictionary or scribble kind of games too.
10) Deriving Best Output/Prioritisation-Post Session
Prioritizing and picking the best ideas defines the output of exercise. Without a framework, you might end up picking up ideas that are good but might take up a lot of time to implement. So we do it this way — Once we have all ideas, we take 5 min of time where every person gets 3 votes to pick the best ideas from all the ideas. We club overlapping ideas together before we go on voting. This will also ensure people go through all the different ideas that came up. Once the voting is done and after the end of the session, we divide the ideas using MoSCoW rule into Must have, Should have, and Nice to have ideas. Then all the “Must have” ideas are put down in a table and prioritized by using this score (Score = {Importance/Urgency} + Confidence — Efforts) This last step usually done in collaboration with PMs
Conclusion
Brainstorming sessions are great. Making participants comfortable should be the utmost priority for the organizer as that will define the productivity of the session. Every team is different with unique people and skillset, you can modify the practices/approach according to what best fits your team.
Also even if your team is planning to do an MVP. Do a timebound brainstorming session with all team members to generate as many ideas/directions as possible to look at how big the canvas can be. Later on, you can prioritize ideas according to the timeline and priority of your team. But by doing this session, all team members can get a flavor of what we are looking at.
Further Reading:
https://www.agilebusiness.org/page/ProjectFramework_10_MoSCoWPrioritisation
