Brainstorms don’t work
They’re broken.
In creative industries, we often resort to them — we love sitting around, shouting ideas and recording them on a whiteboard. Ideas are then captured by a picture and go to die on a camera roll.
What’s worse, brainstorms are often really just braindumps; people dumping ideas based on whatever they just read about in AdWeek. The way they are structured does not stimulate true creativity and creative thinking.
It’s time to evolve the brainstorming process.
We believe effective brainstorms should foster an environment that helps unlock unique and new combinations to creatively solve a problem.
Finding Our Way:
The simple reality is that there’s an infinite number of sources competing for our attention and yet only a finite amount of attention that we actually have. We need creatively in media more than ever. It’s no longer sufficient to just reach consumers. We also need to plan for relevance.
At Initiative we believe that culture is a brand’s bridge to relevance.
We needed our brainstorm process to reflect our philosophy to ensure that our whole team was consistently developing ideas that could effectively diffuse across culture.
And similar to culture, it needed to move fast.
Setting the Groundwork:
- Embrace the Pressure of Time — all of our exercises have a time component to encourage our teams to let their ideas flow freely, removing the obstacle of self-doubt. We use The Time Timer as recommended by Jake Knapp.
- Build Don’t Break — the brainstorm is for divergent thinking and any idea at this stage is incredibly fragile. They need to be nurtured and it’s too easy to dismiss what’s a seemingly “bad idea” by using “no, but, that won’t work”. That will happen later but it’s not allowed in brainstorm sessions.
- Seven or Less — bigger groups should be divided into breakout groups to avoid group-think and to keep the process moving.
- Quantity > Quality — at this stage we focus on volume of thoughts. We want as many sparks as possible so that we can quickly test and focus when we get to the convergent stage.
- Get Ready to Sketch — we incorporate exercises that force people to sketch their ideas because it uses a different part of your brain.
Setting Ourselves Up for Success
i. Identify and Structure the Problem
What is the underlying problem that we are trying to solve? What are the barriers that are keeping us / the brand from reaching our goals? Why?
The root problem is derived working with our Client Advice and Communications Design teams. Once we have arrived at the problem statement we then turn it into a question that will guide us to solutions.
Three formats can be used to articulate the questions:
1. How might we…? (HMW)
2. In what ways could we…? (IWWCW)
3. What are all the ways we could…? (WAATWWC)
(Source: Combustion method by ThinkLab)
ii. Formulate The Insight(s)
Insights are defined as an accurate and deep understanding of the motivational forces behind one’s actions, thoughts and behaviour. It is also one of the most difficult elements to articulate while working to solve a marketing problem.
It’s why we like to think of insights as a catalyst. You know you have a good one if it creates a spark.
We use the following template to help us arrive at a core insight and this work is ideally done prior to the brainstorm session.
iii. Develop a Timed Brainstorm Outline
The final step is to ensure that there is a detailed and timed outline with each of the exercises (see below). This ensures that the brainstorm stays on track and does not go over the allocated time-limit. Based on our experience people start to dread going to brainstorms if they never stay on track and always go-over time. If we say a brainstorm session is 1 hour it’s exactly that and not a minute more.
Spark Sessions — Rapid Ideation
Setting Context — 10 Minutes
We provide a high-level overview of the ground rules, why we are here today and the problem + insight that we are going to be solving in the session.
Here’s the rough structure of how we run a spark session:
1. Generate Stimulus:
The first part of the session is based on divergent thinking and in order to do that effectively we need a lot of stimulus. This becomes the ingredients that we are going to combine to unlock new solutions.
Examples of Stimulus Generating Activities:
The (Breakup/Love) Letter — 3 Minutes
Individually write a break-up letter to the brand or to one of its competitors. The letters are passed clockwise and everyone is asked to individually put one thought/idea/reason for the break-up per Post-It note. Everyone should now have a chain of Post-It notes that are again passed clock-wise.
Word Associations — 2 Minutes
Same structure as the break-up letters except this exercise can use ads from magazines, newspapers, flyers, etc. Random stimulus. Everyone is asked individually to write one word per Post-It note about whatever is in front of them.
Rapid Fire — 5 minutes
Everyone gathers next to a wall with their own Sharpie and Post-It pad. Each person writes down a concise idea, says it out loud and sticks it to the wall. This allows everyone to passively hear the idea, which can be further built or used to spark something entirely different. The point is to spitfire as many ideas as possible. Remember the wilder the ideas, the better. Get down with your bad selves.
Now it’s time to flex those doodling skills you mastered on conference calls.
2. Sketch It, Build It — 5 Minutes Per Round x 2
In this round, each person grabs 3–4 Post-It notes from the wall or passes their Post-It note chain from either of the first two exercises.
The challenge is now to use the stimulus to solve the problem that was unveiled at the start of the session.
Everyone has 5 minutes to sketch out their idea, create a snappy headline and include any necessary bullet points. The point is to have a comprehensive idea that can be passed along without explanation. No one owns an idea.
When time is up everyone is asked to pass their idea clockwise and using a new worksheet are asked to make the idea stronger.
3. Building for Cultural Relevance — 5 Minutes
The worksheets are passed once again clockwise and this time everyone is asked to take a cultural worksheet and think of extensions of the idea that could live within in culture. We help guide their thinking using three cultural opportunity areas:
A) Attach (Pulse Content) = What cultural places, spaces, influencers exist that we want to associate the brand with?
B) Create (New/Tentpole Content)= What cultural places, spaces, events or conversations don’t currently exist, but should?
C) Respond (Always-On Content) = What kinds of signals do we want to respond to? From cultural to potential programmatic triggers
4. Stand-Up and Share — 2 minutes/person
After the last round, each person is asked to stand-up and share their idea + where/how they see it living in culture. Everyone else is asked to remember the ground rules and jot down any builds on a Post-It note so that their thought is not lost.
5. Time to Vote
At the end of the session, we place all of the idea worksheets up on the wall (each round should produce approximately 21 worksheets — 7 people x 3 worksheets). As people are leaving we ask them to vote on the ideas that they believe have the greatest potential to solve the problem. It’s most effective if everyone votes all at once, rather one at a time, to avoid being influenced by others. If there is a client in the room, they’re given a different colour marker to allow their vote to carry a heavier weight.
When done correctly our spark sessions are structured to be one of the most productive hours you’ll have. And your head will likely hurt. That’s a good thing! The next stage is convergence where we take the ideas and start breaking them down and then building them back-up. We’ll save that for Part 2.
