8 characteristics of bad brainstorms

Updated: 24th June 2024

“Brainstorm” seems to be a dirty word for some people these days. And I don’t blame them. When “let’s have a brainstorm” too often translates as “let’s sit in a room and just randomly shout ideas at each other for a while,” I can see why you might develop an allergic reaction to the term.

In fact, there are nearly 10,000 results on Google for the exact phrase “the problem with brainstorming”. And some people want to ban brainstorms outright.

The efficacy of brainstorms should be judged based on sessions run by a skilled facilitator with a proper ideation toolkit. I’ve seen first-hand how they can be a breeding ground for new and interesting ideas and a space for harnessing the genius of teams. Unfortunately, too many brainstorms fall short of that standard. People leave feeling like they’ve been robbed of productive time, and they lose faith in the notion that good ideas can emerge in group workshops.?

To banish bad brainstorms from your organisation, you need to know what not to do. This post guides you through eight common problems so you can run brainstorms people love, and cultivate a culture where group creativity can thrive.?

1. Lack of structure

The biggest anti-brainstorm gripe seems to be with unstructured brainstorms, which unfortunately seems to be the default setting for group idea generation in many organisations. But saying brainstorms are a waste of time because they lack structure is like saying cooking is a waste of time because you’ve only ever seen it attempted by an overenthusiastic 9-year-old without a recipe; a meal prepared by a skilled chef is a very different thing.

Picture the chaos of a room full of people, all talking at once, no clear direction or goal in sight. This may be what comes to mind when you think of a "free-for-all" brainstorm, and if the image alone is stressing you out, that’s understandable. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The most effective brainstorms have a solid structure that gives people a chance to fire up their brains, mixes silent individual thinking with group discussion, and moves through divergent (going wide, generating options) and convergent (narrowing in, describing solutions) modes of thought.

Everything should start with a crystal clear articulation of your challenge, and end with a rigorous critique of your ideas. In between, you have permission to explore novel and unorthodox directions, and extend or remix each other’s ideas.?

2. Poorly prepared facilitator?

A successful brainstorm needs someone to guide the session and curate the vibe. Like any skill, good facilitation takes committed practice - knowing how to encourage participation and manage group dynamics or difficult personalities comes with experience.?

Preparation is also about gathering the right inputs and arriving at a brainstorm with a clear sense of what knowledge already exists relating to the problem or opportunity to be explored, along with an appreciation of the broader goals or vision that ideas should ultimately serve.

3. Lack of diversity?

Creativity thrives when diverse perspectives smush up against each other in search of solutions to a shared challenge. If your brainstorms only include people from the same department, or people with the same backgrounds and life experiences as each other, you can expect mediocre results. Numerous studies have shown that diverse teams are smarter, and as Matthew Syed writes in ‘Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking’:

“The whole point of diversity is to get a wider range of information and ideas to the table so that we can have a more informed and nuanced debate about the problems that we face…

“The reason diversity is so powerful is not because it provides a more interesting backdrop for our conversations, but because it brings different cognitive toolkits to bear on the problems we face…

“Cognitive diversity helps to challenge groupthink, overcome blind spots, and see problems from multiple angles.”?

4. Loud people dominating?

A diverse group isn’t much help if one or two people dominate the session through sheer force of ego. It’s great to have enthusiastic participants who aren’t afraid to speak up, but it’s essential that everyone has a chance to think, share, and reflect.?

Indeed, it’s usually when we make space for the quietest voices to fully contribute and actively listen to everyone’s ideas that the most interesting creative breakthroughs happen.

As ?? Amy Kean ?? wrote on LinkedIn recently:?

“In meetings, and brainstorms, most people don’t really listen... they just wait to speak. And if someone says something too strange and uncomfortable, the conversation will get hurried along. This is how really bad ideas get signed off. Because we default to what's easy and safe… The people who are willing to play with ideas and concepts that jar are the brave ones. Those willing to listen to the quietest voices normally find gold.”

5. No warm-ups (or super cringey warm-ups)?

It can be challenging for participants to dive into a brainstorm without a chance to shift their brains into creative thinking mode and establish a sense of psychological safety within the group.?

But not all warm-ups are created equal - if you’ve ever had to endure a cringey “fun fact” icebreaker or been filled with panic when asked to think up two truths and a lie on the spot, you’ll know what I mean.

A personal favourite is asking people to write a haiku about the project, their current mood, or their hopes for the session.

6. Premature judgement?

It’s not true that you need to completely withhold judgement for brainstorms to have a chance of birthing brilliant ideas; if you never expose ideas to critique, you’ll either launch stupid stuff or convince everyone that brainstorms are really nothing more than a bit of fun (rather than a place where serious thinking can happen).

But premature judgement can kill ideas before they have a chance to be developed, extended, remixed, and adapted into something great. This happens every day. Someone bravely shares a fresh, slightly fuzzy thought - in their head it’s pregnant with possibility, but to someone else it’s a reminder of a project from 4 years ago that turned out to be a waste of time. Or it’s such an unusual idea that it sounds a little ridiculous at first, and nobody wants to risk their reputation by going along with it when they could just stick with something familiar and safe. The idea gets a resounding “nope”, and it’s flushed down the memory hole, gone forever. This is a tragedy - as Einstein once said, “if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”?

When brainstorming, you always need to balance free-thinking, rule-breaking, anything-goes ideas with even-minded critique, but the art is in refining and describing ideas carefully before asking why they might not work.

7. Lack of focus?

When participants don't have a clear understanding of what your brainstorm is trying to accomplish, they’ll easily get distracted and lose interest.?

To avoid this, it's important to establish a clear focus or goal. Every brainstorm should begin with a specific problem or challenge to be addressed - when everyone has a clear and rich understanding of the challenge, there’s a better chance of generating relevant ideas. There’s also more licence to introduce unusual activities and welcome wild ideas when there’s a clear focus to keep you grounded.?

8. Mismatched expectations, plus lack of follow-up?

Brainstorms can be a great place to explore, develop, and critique ideas, but you shouldn’t expect all details to be figured out in a single session. There’s almost always more work to do afterwards to transform the ideas you’ve generated into something ready to build.?

If people come to a brainstorm expecting to finish with final answers, there’s a good chance they’ll be disappointed with the results. It’s better to think of brainstorms as a group foraging expedition, where people find and collect interesting ingredients for the “kitchen” to work with afterwards (i.e. the team ultimately accountable for testing, launching, and maintaining a solution).?

It’s always helpful to build some “incubation time” into your plans - some time for ideas to stew and evolve after your brainstorm - before you decide what to do next. Ideally, participants should have a chance to reflect and build on their ideas (and others’ ideas) after the session, at their own pace.

An individual or team should have clear ownership over the outputs from the session, and should communicate decisions and next steps to participants, even if they won’t be involved in the project moving forward.?

And sometimes you’ll need a few brainstorms around a single challenge - the real magic happens when you integrate robust brainstorming practices into your day-to-day work, rather than treating brainstorms as occasional breaks from your regular routine.?Ideas fuel everything, after all.

Brainstorms, at their best, embed a spirit of playful adventurousness into team-based work. Done well, they can help promote a culture of active listening, mutual respect, and flexible thinking. Facilitated mindfully, they can open doors to new, shared ways of understanding the world.

And if you still hate the word, just call them idea sessions.?

Want ideas that hit different?

Ideas On Acid is a toolkit like no other...

It's a set of cards designed for adventurous minds like yours, authored by me.

It's for people who want to go beyond the kind of obvious thinking that usually happens in brainstorms.

Find out more and order a copy at IdeasOnAcid.com.