Creating breakthroughs with effective brainstorms
We tend to think that innovative, fresh work, happens from creative moments of inspiration. As if we were sipping coffee on our back porch and “poof” our killer idea pops up; Or going for a run or a hike in the woods. And sometimes this is actually the case — we tend to find great ideas when we turn off our brains and let our subconscious feed the conscious (that is, misc thoughts feeding into our active thoughts); So it isn’t uncommon for moments of inspiration to strike us when we least expect it.
But with this, we can’t readily predict when and how much inspiration we’ll get. So there are 2 inherit issues we face when seeking breakthroughs in this way:
•Moments of inspiration often come when we least expect it
•Because of this, it is not a process we can rely on.
So, you need brainstorms complement your creative work…for breakthroughs. And to be clear, breakthroughs are different for every person, every team, and every organization.
Better brainstorms start by feeding the subconscious
If you know me or follow me on LinkedIn, you know I am really big on being deliberate and delivering deliberate action (Being deliberate is a “super” trick to being more effective and happy in your job role, life, and and overall career).
Before the brainstorming happens, it helps to deliberately feed your subconscious. This is harder than it sounds because it takes very deliberate action. You have to control of your time…put simply, you have to make time to turn off and “consume”. This could be reading, writing, drawing, exercise, travel, cooking, and more. Its not likely that sitting on netflix is going to feed your subconscious in the right way — you have to feed yourself culture, create creative opportunities and deliberately take in what you’re seeing. Soak it in and don’t omit the details.
When your subconscious is sufficiently fed on a consistent basis (yes it is an ongoing thing), you’re more likely to have inspirational moments — both out and in brainstorms. And this also means that when you have brainstorms, you are more likely to bring more to the table (whether you know it or not).
Part of an effective brainstorm is to unlock your subconscious.
Start with the ambitious
For most teams, you can use brainstorms for any type of projects. For brand design teams, they are particularly most effective on large branding initiatives — when you don’t have much of a baseline and are building from scratch.
Regardless, start as ambitious as you can. The process for defining an “from scratch initiatives” is filled of ambitious, unpractical, crazy ideas. If your creative brainstorms and planning sessions don’t seem a little crazy, a little unpractical, and a little daunting, you are not trying hard enough. Sometimes the crazy things are more practical than you think, once you take the time to break them down. And if you want to push boundaries in your space, you gotta start big.
You need those cool, fun, what-if type, ideas.
They help frame the core motion or idea through exaggeration. 50% of a good idea is usually still a good idea, but 50% of a bad idea is worse of a bad idea. It’s also a heck of a lot more fun to play with big ideas. And if you’re at a high-growth company, you should work on building the muscle for big budget ideas, because at some point, you’ll get the opportunity to actually act on them. Make sure you’re scaled to be ready.
Creating effective brainstorm sessions
Most brainstorms aren’t very effective and fail for 3 core reasons:
• Teammates don’t feel the environment is safe for sharing ideas
• Brainstorm leader (usually the highest ranking in the room) already knows what they want, it is usually clear to the group, even if the leader is trying to hide it
• The loudest voice drowns everyone else out
When I was introduced to affinity mapping exercises about a year ago, I have since been hooked. And every time I employ a session like what I’m describing below, the results always speak for themselves and teams leave exhausted but excited for the work they did and for the work ahead.
What is affinity mapping?
From the interaction design foundation, they have a really good summary of affinity mapping/diagrams:
Affinity diagrams are a great method to help you make sense of all your information when you have a lot of mixed data, such as facts, [ethnographic research] , ideas from brainstorms, user opinions, [user needs] , insights, and design issues. [Affinity diagrams] or clustering exercises are all about bundling and grouping information, and this method can be one of the most valuable methods to employ. For this reason, it is used in many phases of [Design Thinking] , as well as outside of the design context.*
[Read their full content here]
Tools for the job
One of my favorite tools to use for collaboration is: Miro. It is incredibly easy for your team to collaborate openly, easily, and remotely. The tool is amazingly powerful, responsive and beautiful (yeah, that’s important). It is one of my top recommended tools for a design team’s tech stack — but really, any team who cares about collaboration should use it. It is also incredibly flexible beyond brainstorm sessions; you can use it to create user mapping journeys, wireframes, agile/project kanban boards, presentations, giving feedback on work, and more. An out of the box use case; I’ve kept team values and team career paths on a Miro board for un-gated, always up-to-date access within the team.
For designers: During the exercise, make sure to ask and answer questions around the emotional impact you want to deliver, messaging, copy, type, brand strategy, and more. The Miro board you create can then become a central hub for all teams you work with, esp key stakeholders, to view the latest creative.
Drafting the practical
Once you’ve made good progress on your brainstorm session, its important to evaluate your ideas: spending time to figure out how to execute on them. Here are some questions to get you started:
• What can we execute that fits into the budget?
• What can we execute within our timeframe?
• What excites us the most about what we put on the board?
• What elements of this excite us?
• What does 50% of the idea look like?
• What are the similarities of what we put on the board?
• What are the things that are different among items we put on the board?
• What are the must-haves?
When the affinity exercise ends, take a day/s break and plan another day to come together. Your next step should be to pull inspiration. This step doesn’t have to be just for designers—and to be clear, Design Thinking is not just for designers, its a process for breakthrough work. Organizations that use Design Thinking within their teams & companies see immense success. For designers, with regards to pulling inspiration, we start to find branding, posters, video, mograph, experiences and events we think are successful and represent some of the things we mapped out on our board. We also pull together no designed work—Not contextual, already solutioned work. This second part of inspiration gathering is particularly important in creating something unique with emotional impact & clarity. This then helps us to examine how other works deliver emotional impact, and what feelings are right for us and the project we’re doing.
One of things we never said? “Oh we can’t do that.” Or “we aren’t that good.” Set the goal and then go get it.Remembering 50% of a good idea is usually still a good idea.
During this inspiration phase, we do another exercise to map out the things we missed. This session focuses around what we like and don’t like of our inspiration, what didn’t we think about (leading with “how might we” questions), and openly debate more visual nuances. As designers, we start to create design principles that will fuel all of our design decisions for the project at hand, from web, print, digital, event experiences, video, and more.
Getting pen to paper
Your brainstorm sessions won’t be much if you don’t turn them to action. Make sure that after each session, you have action items. Don’t let your ideas sit on the wall (or virtual board). This is so crucial. Don’t make this just a fun exercise, keep the momentum going and ensure that the work you did gets fed into the subconscious—marinating on your activity while you do other projects is a strong creative driver.
One of the things you can do with Miro is share your board with different teams. You can seek additional feedback or just open it up for sharing and collaboration. If the work you’re doing starts to bleed into other teams who didn’t participate in the workshop, the time you’ve spent on your miro boards will be amazingly helpful in getting those teams up to speed.
I encourage you to think about some of the process elements above, and see how you can bring them into your team. You don’t have to be designers to do any of the things I mentioned — they can work for you, with just a little tweaking that match your goals.
This is not a miro sponsored post. Miro did not ask me to write this…I just love the tool.
