Better Brainstorming
Brainstorming is probably the most popular group technique used to generate ideas — “let’s brainstorm it” is heard in organisations of all kinds around the world every day. It’s also an important tool for Product Managers as it’s useful for workshops with stakeholders or customers in which you may be capturing many requirements or trying to solve a particular problem. All those funky ideation techniques have brainstorming as their foundation, and of course you can do this face-to-face or virtually using a collaboration app like Miro.
Despite its ubiquity, brainstorming is often done badly, and I’ve been involved in sessions that have been poorly planned, don’t have a clear objective, are badly moderated and don’t go on to turn the ideas into action. If you’re not doing it properly then your wasting people’s time and frustrating them in the process, so it’s good to know how to brainstorm effectively.
Where did brainstorming come from?
The term “brainstorm” was coined by Alex Osborn in 1939 and later expanded on in his 1948 book entitled “Your Creative Power”. Osborn was (still is in fact) the O in BBDO, and during his tenure it was one of the most successful and creative ad agencies on Madison Avenue. He introduced brainstorming out of his frustration at the lack of original and creative ideas coming out of his agency, and as a result, Osborn felt that the quantity and quality of ideas generated for BBDO’s various ad campaigns and pitches increased significantly. The key principles that underpinned his group approach to ideation were:
a) Defer judgment (withhold criticism)
b) Reach for quantity (quantity breeds quality)
c) Freewheeling is welcome (welcome wild ideas)
d) Combine and improve ideas (stimulation of ideas through association)
Criticism of brainstorming
Brainstorming is not without its critics, and a number of empirical studies have even suggested that brainstorming individually leads to an increase in the number and variety of ideas compared to group brainstorming since you don’t get as much convergence as in a group setting.
Others such as Charlan Nemeth claim that the instruction not to criticise also reduces the number of ideas generated because it stifles the very discussion that can lead to stimulation. The following framework takes this research into account and provides 10 steps to getting the most of your brainstorming sessions.
1 Clearly frame the problem to be solved
Be specific, target an explicit objective and structure the exercise as a question that begins “How could we…?” or “How might we…?” This provides a good starting point for creative and open-ended idea generation, but it also confines the ideas to a specific challenge. For example:
How might we:
Make it easier for users to do xyz?
Increase our trial conversion rate?
Improve cross-team communication?
Decrease processing time for xyz?
2 Get the right people together
If you want to generate as many creative ideas as possible, you should aim to get a diverse group of people together from different disciplines who will feel comfortable with each other. Getting a massive group of people in a room is not going to help either, in fact it’ll hinder the process by making it unmanageable. Go for no more than 10 people chosen on the basis of their intelligence, diversity, domain expertise and ability to work well together.
3 Prepare the group
Send out the problem and guidelines to the session in advance, so that the group is prepared and has given some thought to what they’re going to be doing. Remember, some studies showed that the number and variety of ideas is increased in individual brainstorming sessions, so you may even want to ask the group to write down their ideas and bring them to the group session. That way you get the best of both worlds.
4 Find a good location
You want to create a favourable environment for your group to create as many ideas as possible, so try and find a quiet, comfortable room somewhere where you won’t be interrupted. Make sure that there’s plenty of space to write, draw and stick your thoughts — good coffee and donuts are also conducive to easing tensions and stimulating the imagination. No laptops, phones or tablets allowed, unless these are being used to facilitate the session. If you can do it off site, then even better.
5 Appoint a moderator and a scribe
You need a moderator to guide the session effectively, and this means laying down the ground rules for the participants, and then making sure that these are followed throughout. Encourage people to share their thoughts but guide the discussion, make sure you’re having one conversation at a time and bring it back on topic if it gets too sidetracked. Also, you need someone who’s going to focus on taking notes throughout, writing post-its, drawing on the whiteboard etc.
6 Welcome wild ideas, defer criticism, and go for quantity
Don’t worry about how feasible or unfeasible the ideas are. Your goal is to free yourselves from the usual corporate constraints and generate as many ideas as possible within a short period of time. The rationale here is that quantity leads to quality, and the more ideas you have, the more likely you’ll come up with one that’s unusual, breakthrough or innovative. As Osborn said:
“Forget quality; aim now to get a quantity of answers. When you’re through, your sheet of paper may be so full of ridiculous nonsense that you’ll be disgusted. Never mind. You’re loosening up your unfettered imagination — making your mind deliver.”
7 Encourage people to build on each other’s ideas
Make sure that the panel of brainstormers is combining and improving the ideas that it generates by using a process of association. Mind mapping is a good approach for this.
8 Timebox the session
Go for two hours and see how many ideas you can create within that time. A bit of time pressure is good to get the creative juices flowing, and there’s no reason why a group of 7 or 8 people can’t get 100 ideas or more down within a couple of hours. If you’re brainstorming something big and complex, break it down into separate sessions.
9 Get a short list of ideas
So you’ve got a massive pile of physical or virtual post-it notes, but at some point you’re going to have to start processing those in order to focus on how your going to convert all that good creative ideation into action. This is also where the debate comes in; as you you start to refine and prune what you have, you may find that other ideas are generated as a result of discussion. Use whatever criteria you want to narrow the number down, and get your panel to vote on their top 3–5 ideas with little red dots. From there, get them to agree on those they want to take forward.
10 Get a plan of action together
Once you’ve got your top ideas, you need to put a plan together in order to convert those into actionable tasks. You can do this within the same session, but your better off dong it separately. The people brainstorming are not necessarily going to be the same people who are gong to be doing a lot of the work required to deliver a successful project. Tell the panel what the next steps are, and by when you’ll distribute the output of the session.
