Follow These 3 Steps for Better Brainstorming

Welcome back to Leader Ladder! Today, we’re focusing on an often-overlooked technique that’s key to both strategic planning and project management: brainstorming. Brainstorming often follows just two steps, but if you miss the third, you might miss out on new opportunities and leave key insights on the table. Read on for today’s quick, easy, and effective technique.

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Inspirational Quote

“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” – Linus Pauling

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Leadership Technique to Try: 3 Step Brainstorming

Brainstorming often follows two steps: 1) Create a list of ideas; 2) Make a decision.

However, you can often obtain better results by adding a step in the middle:

1)???? Create a list of ideas

2)???? Define the selection criteria

3)???? Make a decision

Brainstorming is, by its nature, goal-oriented. Once you’ve clearly defined the goal to be achieved, you’re ready to start brainstorming. However, once you feel everyone has put forward all their suggestions, how is a selection made? To answer that, you’ll need selection criteria – and you’ll want to make those clear. In tandem, consider holding a separate brainstorming session to create the brainstorming selection criteria. By openly discussing and agreeing on clear selection criteria, you’ll help avoid the alternative scenario in which people silently use their own criteria, which may be in conflict with other team members and lead to a suboptimal decision.

Often, brainstorming is done live during a meeting; however, you might also find it’s useful to start brainstorming beforehand, allowing team members to jot down their ideas onto a shared online document or program over a few days or even weeks, which helps reduce time pressure, helps generate more ideas, and preserves more time during the meeting to evaluating the ideas and making a decision.

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Top Resource: IdeaBoardz

Over the years, one of my consistent favorite tools for brainstorming is IdeaBoardz. It’s an online, free-to-use tool that offers lots of customization options and makes brainstorming a breeze for teams of any size.

Rise boldly.