Brainstorming The Good And Bad

Since Brainstorming was first introduced, it has been used in several very different ways some good some not so.

The intent of Brainstorming is to bring together a small group of objective, open-minded, agendaless folks to openly consider several new possibilities to try, some of the different ways that I have observed that organizations have misused brainstorming:

• Brainstorming where poor leadership, premature judgments, and critique are allowed to constrain ideas to very weak increments of existing solutions, nothing truly new, novel, or creative comes forward.
• Allowing Brainstorming to become feel-good happy places where people throw out ideas grounded more in fantasy than in business realities, this shows that proper constraints are not being used. Thus no useful ideas that the business can use.
• They are using brainstorming sessions for posturing to create the appearance of being creative (known as innoganda).
• Turing brainstorming sessions into elaborate off-sites where far too many stakeholders are involved, each with their own hidden agenda, so that no real, productive, outcomes are achieved, and in fact, all genuine creativity is squelched.

For Brainstorming to be effective and to justify the time and effort it requires, Innovation Teams must master the art of properly conduct and profit from them. This means knowing how to apply the right amount of structure and direction. Too little structure and leadership will likely produce useless ideas unrelated to the problem the business is trying to solve. To much structure, and the efforts will probably repress the team's collective imagination. Thus missing out on the novel, insightful, and creative ideas that could have been produced. The process if it to produce viable new ideas and concepts has to encourage the team to be optimistic and forward-thinking with a sense of hope and anticipation for the future, while at the same time grounding them in appropriate business constraints.

Good Brainstorming will be capable of producing many wide-ranging ideas. That is genuinely novel, creative, and insightful, which is also viable for and actionable by the business. This dual mandate presents a tall order that demands a well-designed, well-structured, and well-run facilitation process. Learning to facilitate productive brainstorming sessions is one of the essential requirements for an Innovation Leader.

Being able to conduct practical brainstorming sessions requires the Innovation Leader to master these eight distinct matters:

1. The choice of people who will participate.
2. To establish a sense of conceptual space for the team.
3. The designation of roles for facilitating the session and the skills of the people who will fill these roles.
4. The choice and arrangement of the physical space for the team.
5. Select the materials and supplies that will enable the group to capture and play with ideas.
6. The rules that the Innovation Leader establishes will require the team to agree to adhere to it.
7. The direction setting and constraints that will be used to focus the team.
8. The energy the leader is able to build inside the session.