Brainstorming is not dead. It’s just difficult to get it right
Brainstorming is often dismissed as a bad way of creating anything new, but really it’s just a matter of skill and effort to make it work. Here’s some tips.
Brainstorming has a really bad reputation nowadays. Usually the ones who dismiss brainstorming are the ones that have tried sitting in a room with too many people, too much hierarchy and too much fear of failing. Of course brainstorming isn’t going to work with that lineup in that environment. It’s too strict and tense and most probably the participants are more focused on being smart than being good at brainstorming. Yes, there is a difference.
A goal, a structure and a time limit
The most important thing a good brainstorming session needs, is a goal. Something to focus on together. Creative work is a lot easier if you have some kind of a shared problem that you are all solving. Frames where to paint the picture in. The more interesting problem, the better. However, missing a goal is something that normally isn’t the problem with the current brainstorming sessions. To have a good goal (and session), group would need sufficient amount of information about the thing they are ideating on. They need to know what kind of problem they are solving, who’s problem it really is and why they are trying to solve that. So there’s some preparation you have to make in order to get a good start. The team shouldn’t have too strictly defined goals, more like a sandbox where to play with questions and ideas. They need to have some creative freedom.
“The team shouldn’t have too strictly defined goals, more like a sandbox where to play with questions and ideas.”
Even though brainstorming can be considered as creative session, it needs a strong, simple structure. Proper warm up before and some summary afterwards. That should be enough. You don’t want to kill the session with rules, but you need to keep it together just enough to be able to get wild.
Usually this kind of sessions happen in the middle of your working day at the office, where you’ve learned to be sensible, polite and logical. You have to let go of those for a while when you start brainstorming. You need a different part of your brains for creative ideating than surviving the office environment. You need to switch off your restrictions. You need to warm up. If you don’t, the session will not be a storm but more like a moderate wind at best. The best warm ups are usually physical ones that include movements that breaks the boundaries a bit. Some loud noises, some unexpected movement and some physical contact to other participants. The less boundaries we have in these sessions, the better. Sounds difficult, but more often than not these session die before they even start.
After the brainstorming is done, everybody returns to their desks and probably forgets everything that’s been said in the session. So some kind of summary is needed to get those ideas harvested. Good summary section usually has some voting and some action points for the next steps. The end result should be something that helps everyone to go back to the moments of idea creation in their head afterwards. So that they’ll also know where these ideas came from, and not only what the end result is.
“Good summary usually has some voting and some action points for the next steps.”
You need to timebox the session. This is also something that currently almost all the brainstorming session have. So that’s not really a problem. The problem is that the sessions are usually too short or too long. You can’t spend the whole day pouring out ideas, but it’s also really hard to spontaneously come up with great ideas with 10 people in 30 minutes.
From my experience the proper time slot would be something like this: Warm up (about 10 min per participant) + workshopping (15 min per participant x problems to solve) + summary (min. 10min/participant/problem). That’s really rough estimation, but the message is that time should be dependant on the size of the group. So with 4 participants and one major problem to solve, you would need about 2.5 hours.
I would say brainstorming is kind of like playing. It’s about having fun together in a tight and focused group with a some kind of time limit. The more people you have, harder it will be to keep it together. It’s also really important that everybody knows how to play. With a group of adults, it’s sadly not something we can take for granted. To make games work, there has to be some kind of guidelines, but not too many and not too strict.
Some guidelines for brainstorming
These guidelines comes mainly from improv theatre. I’ve been somehow involved in improv theatre since I was 12, so I’ve soaked up their propaganda pretty well. The craft of improv has been refined for a long time and they’ve come up with certain guidelines that make teamwork actually work. Not every time of course, because it –just like brainstorming– is about individual personas. We can now learn from these improv guys and fix our broken ideas of brainstorming.
“We can now learn from these improv guys and fix our broken ideas of brainstorming.”
There’s really three basic ingredients that make brainstorming session work: Saying yes to impulses, committing to ideas and realising you (and your ideas) are there to support others.
1. Say YES AND…
The most important guideline is to learn to say YES to other people’s suggestions and your own impulses. But hey, isn’t that some kind of bad and uncreative consensus we are building now? No it isn’t and yes it kind of is. Consensus isn’t bad when it’s achieved through shared creative process. Then we have successfully developed a lot of ideas and weeded some not so good ones out. It’s bad when consensus is the goal and potential creative ideas are sacrificed to achieve that. A good sign of a bad consensus is that the best idea is boss’s idea.
Usually in the business world people are used to find out what’s wrong with the idea and see if it flies when questioned. That is sometimes disguised as YES BUT… However, that’s almost as destructive as saying NO to the idea. In brainstorming we are trying to make the ideas fly using what ever we have. That’s why it’s important to say YES AND… We are trying to step on each other’s ideas. Not trying to squash them but to reach higher together than what we could have reached by ourselves. Less competition, more co-operation.
2. Commit
(Contrary to any expectations you might have, it’s not more difficult for men to achieve.)
When you’re brainstorming, there’s going to be loads of ideas and questions. Even some good ones. And we should stick to all of them, right? No we don’t. We have to listen to everyone and contribute as much as we can. When you have an idea, see how far it takes you and try to make it work to the point where either others are also joining your train of thought or you mutually understand that this idea is no more. It is an ex-idea. It has ceased to be. (Although, sometimes the good ideas might just be resting). You commit to the idea and do everything you can to save it from extinction. When everyone does this, all the good ideas will grow up to be even better ones. It’s like mini evolution where only the fittest will survive.
Sometimes in this kind of situations someone gets stuck with some (usually their own) idea. This means that either the warm up has been too short, these people are not listening other impulses enough or they have some kind of agenda with that idea.
Brainstorming is quite intensive and you should have breaks often where you unwind your brains. After the break you should take a look at the ideas and try to squeeze all the rest of the juices out of them. When you commit to to the idea, you are taking the route to go deeper into the problem solving. It’s sometimes called as “finding the second right answer” because we can assume that there’s no just one right answer. We have to build these new ideas to be so sensible that they all might be the right solution.
“It’s sometimes called as “finding the second right answer” because we can assume that there’s no just one right answer.”
3. Support others
You all have to understand that this isn’t about you or anyone else. It’s about your ideas and you as a group. You have to leave your egos out and be there to support others. Not all groups can pull this off. When everyone is there to support others, everyone is equally important and you have to believe that all the ideas are equally good. This requires mutual respect.
We have to be prepared for mistakes. There will be a lot of misfires, stupid ideas and losing of focus. We have to help each other to cope with those. The best case scenario is where we can listen to those mistakes and add something in our own thinking from them.
There will be feedback given during the brainstorming, but let’s not kill each others ideas before they are born. Let’s give positive feedback even if we realise that this isn’t going to be the best idea in the world. Maybe the next one is. Maybe someone else will come up with the better one after hearing the bad one.
“Let’s give positive feedback even if we realise that this isn’t going to be the best idea in the world.”
People who participate in brainstorming has to be able to generate lots of ideas, listen to each other and appreciate all the ideas.
Let’s do this
I can’t emphasise enough how much brainstorming is teamwork. When It’s done right, it’s one of the most intimate and exhausting ways group of people can do together. That and an orgy (I’ve heard). At best it feels like your brain had been in a storm. After that storm, you can find the good ideas that are still working and they can be taken onwards.
Some concrete advice how to make brainstorming work
Good things to say:
- Hey, what if…
- That’s fun! We could add…
- Nice perspective! That reminds me of…
What not to say:
- Yes, but we’ve done that already.
- I don’t think that would work.
- My idea was better.
I hope this post sparks a lot of discussion, refinements and new ideas about brainstorming.
