7 tips for a productive brainstorm sessions
Here we go again… Another invite, another brainstorm session and probably another day of wasting thousands of post its. Great! (sarcastic) Or maybe not? Too many brainstorm sessions and meetings end in agony while they don’t need to. But imagine what could happen if your sessions were productive and creative?
All you need to do is to get the energy right and creativity will ooze from every pore. So here’s a few tips to making your next session worthwhile:
1: BE PREPARED
You can’t have a route without a starting point and a destination. A good creative session has a holistic project approach based on enough research and insights to set a solid base. Remember that a good brainstorm isn’t about thinking outside the box, it is about thinking inside the right-sided box. It’s about communicating, not competing.
There is no point in a brainstorm session if not everyone is on the same page about the goal. So if you want to get valuable ideas, define the problem and make sure everyone understands it. Lay out the context and definitions. Pick an appropriate facilitator. Create the right team(s). Establish some ground rules and kick off with an original icebreaker and interesting facts to get the creative juices flowing.
2: GET MOVING
Time to get your brainstormies up and moving, get them to think on their feet, so to speak. Surprise them, get their blood pumping and stimulate thought. Sometimes a new vantage point can do wonders to help you see things in a new light and come up with fresh ideas. Plus, all the moving will raise the energy and adrenaline levels in the room. Keeping everyone fresh and focused.
3: FACILITATE AND GUIDE
If I ask you what is the most impressive thing you’ve ever done, you’d probably come up with a million things, to then realize a day later that none of those is the actual answer. However, if I make my question more specific you’d probably tell me the memory that stroke you the most. The same counts for creative brainstorm sessions; You need boundaries to inspire award-winning thinking. You could, for example, introduce a hypothesis or create a storyboard with personas and moments to work around.
It’s key to have a facilitator of the session that is not directly involved in the project at hand. Someone who will stimulate the team to get the most out of the session, but who’s knowledge and insights of the project’s goal won’t interfere with the creative process. Basically, someone who will help with clustering and evaluating ideas.
4: DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY
Spice it up! Make it fun! Doing the same thing you always do might do the job, but it won’t force your creativity to be maximized. Creative people think differently. Why? There is no magic bullet or pill, they simply switch up routines. We all have the potential for creativity and a crucial trigger is the experience of unusual and unexpected events. Doing the session differently will help to approach the challenge differently. The goal is to bounce lots of ideas and gain inspiration from others. To remove roadblocks to free new directions of ideas that wouldn’t have been considered otherwise. And remember, if everyone immediately agrees on something it means you did not question it enough.
5: QUANTITY OVER QUALITY
Fight the temptation to stop at the first good idea. Often the first good idea is OK — but why settle for OK? The first part of a creative session, should focus on quantity. Try to generate as many ideas as possible in a short time frame. Write down / visualize every single idea that pops up, regardless of how crazy or useless it sounds. Categorize the ideas, so it’s easy to look back at them and merge them. Next, the time has come to pick the strongest ideas and build on them. Don’t stick with just one but work with a few completely different concepts. Focus on the possibilities every concept has and then pick the one you think is the most feasible.This might all sound like an old record, but try it, you will be surprised at what you get.
6: TIME IT
Especially when it comes to generating great ideas, you want to make sure the team does not overthink it. You want to keep the sessions short and to the point. You want the adrenaline to rise and make sure nobody feels insecure about speaking up. What better way to do this then by setting time limits? It’s always smart to decide how much time each part should take and to have a workflow that’s as specific as possible so things keep moving smoothly. …
7: DON’T FORGET TO FOLLOW UP
The point of a good session is that it has a holistic approach, creative sessions cannot stand by themselves, they need preparatory work and most importantly, follow up. A creative session should be the soil to kick off or to provide solutions for a much larger project. No one wants their time going to waste, so at the end of the meeting you need to recap everything that the group came up with and create action items to move forward with. Create a plan of attack, provide clear deadlines and timetables and bring ideas to life using visual means.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +441,678 people.
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