How to run a brainstorming session that truly generates ideas

Discover the five strategies that will transform your brainstorming sessions

You have been preparing a brainstorming session for the new killer product. The stage is set in the conference room, where you await your team’s arrival with a table scattered with colorful post-its and whiteboards wiped clean, ready for the storm of creativity.

However, the vibrant scene you pictured begins to fade to gray. What you envisioned as a hurricane of post-its and crazy ideas turns out to be a gentle breeze. After 45 minutes filled with awkward pauses, tentative suggestions, and ideas chasing their own tails, everyone returned to their cubicles. You find yourself grappling with disappointment, turning over the events in your mind and wondering, “What went wrong?”

Many of us may find this situation only too familiar. Today, I would like you to join me on a journey toward building brainstorming sessions that generate creative, impactful, and actionable ideas. Throughout this journey, we will explore 5 strategies that will unleash the full potential of your brainstorming sessions.

Start with why

The first step toward your successful brainstorming session is clearly defining the problem you and your team are trying to solve. A clear purpose is crucial for aligning everyone’s efforts toward a common goal. Without it, it would be challenging for participants to produce relevant and actionable ideas.

A good way to articulate your problem is by phrasing it like a question. This question should contain:

• A “problem to solve” or “the what” that summarizes the task for which the team will generate ideas.
• A “business objective” or “the why” that conveys the impact the ideas should have on the business. Ideally, this should be a measurable business metric.

Your question should leave the “how” for the team to discover in a creative way. This question is usually structured like:

How might we <insert your ”what” here> so that <insert your “why” here>?

For example, if you are preparing a brainstorming session to discuss the next steps for your killer app, your question might look something like:

How might we improve the app (the “what”) so that we increase user engagement (the “why”)?

This format pushes your team to stay focused while enabling them to be creative, without introducing any biases. Aim to keep it short and sweet, no more than one line. Once you are ready, add it at the top of the whiteboard, big and bright, so your team members always keep it in mind.

Set the room for?success

For your session to be a success, every member must be present, both physically and mentally. Furthermore, they should feel comfortable voicing their craziest ideas without fear of judgment. However, each member coming into the session might have a million things on their mind, and their mood might fluctuate depending on how their day is going. That’s why I suggest starting with a warm-up exercise. This helps set a positive tone, loosen their minds, and focus everyone on the task at hand.

My personal favorite is “Yes and…”. In this exercise, each team member needs to build on whatever the previous person said. The first person makes a statement or suggestion, and the second person accepts it without hesitation by saying “Yes and…” Then, the second person needs to add something new. This can be a new detail, perspective, or action that builds upon the initial idea. This cycle continues around the room for 3 minutes, and each participant takes turns saying “Yes, and…” and contributing something new to the scene.

This exercise, commonly used in improvisational theatre, promotes acceptance of ideas, teamwork, and creativity, setting everyone in the right mindset.

Generate as many ideas as you?can

So far, you have created a compelling objective, and everyone is in the right mindset for brainstorming. Now, it is time to move into the brainstorming process. However, without a structured system for generating, filtering, and refining the ideas generated, it can be difficult to determine which ones are worth pursuing. For this purpose, I use the process inspired by Stanford University Design Thinking, which divides the brainstorming session into 2 phases.

During the first phase, called “ideas generation”, you and your team will generate as many creative, out-of-the-box ideas as possible in a short time. To ensure that you maintain a collaborative environment that can generate innovative solutions, this phase is guided by 6 principles:

1. Defer Judgment: Encourage everyone to suspend all critique or criticism during the idea generation phase. All ideas, no matter how unconventional, should be welcomed.
2. Encourage Wild Ideas: All participants must feel free to think outside the box and suggest unconventional or seemingly far-fetched ideas.
3. Build on the Ideas of Others: Encourage your team to listen to and build upon each other’s ideas rather than working in isolation. This is likely to yield more robust solutions.
4. Stay Focused on the Topic: Ensure that the brainstorming session remains focused on the specific problem or challenge at hand. Your objective, written on the whiteboard, should be a constant reminder for the team.
5. Be Visual: Communicate ideas more efficiently by adding visual aids such as sketches, emojis, or diagrams.
6. Go for Quantity: Quantity can lead to quality, as it allows for a broader range of options to be considered.

Using these principles, you and your team should generate a good number of ideas?—?ideally, a minimum of 15–20 original ideas is recommended. Make sure to note them down in Post-its and stick them on the whiteboard. Once you are happy, look for common themes or categories. Are there any high-level topics that group some of your ideas? Move your ideas around to group them into common topics. It doesn’t matter if these topics overlap, as this aims to shed light on which topics your team has covered?—?and which topics might have been overlooked.

Focus on high-impact ideas

After this “idea generation” exercise, your whiteboard should be pretty full of ideas. The next question that comes to everyone’s mind is: How do we decide which ideas to explore first? The second phase of this brainstorming session aims to answer this question. The objective of this phase, known as “concept screening”, is to pick the 2–3 top ideas to explore after the session.

For this second phase, you will need a clean whiteboard to draw the impact-effort matrix. This matrix looks like this:

This matrix is divided into 4 quadrants:

• High Effort, Low Impact?—?Thankless Tasks → Ideas that require a lot of manpower or are technically risky, but generate little value for our stakeholders.
• High Effort, High Impact—Big Projects → These ideas will have a tremendous impact on your business but require significant effort and associated risk. This is why this quadrant is usually known as the “Challenge Quadrant.”
• Low Effort, Low Impact?—?Fill in Jobs → These are initiatives with little impact on your business, but also require little work from the team.
• Low Effort, High Impact?—?Quick wins → These ideas are the stars of the show. These are feasible ideas that require little from your team but will have a big impact on the business.

Based on these criteria, your team can now arrange the ideas from the first phase (ideas generation) on the different quadrants.

After this exercise, which one to prioritize will depend on your team’s goals and your own circumstances. The usual strategy is to address the quick wins first and then debate whether you should focus on “fill-in jobs” or “Big Projects.” Whichever criteria you use, this framework will provide a visual way of discussing and deciding which ideas should be prioritized and articulating why you made this decision.

Plan and?iterate

By now, your team should have a clear sense of which innovative ideas should be explored and select the low-hanging fruits that maximize their impact. Before you declare victory and everyone returns to their workday, plan what’s next. This could involve assigning responsibility for each idea to a specific team member or scheduling a follow-up meeting to discuss and refine them.

As our journey through the science behind brainstorming comes to an end, remember that mastering the art of leading brainstorming sessions requires practice and patience. Continue to encourage curiosity, foster an environment where ideas flourish, and, most importantly, embrace the process of creative thinking as an ongoing journey. By doing so, you ensure that your brainstorming sessions are not only productive but also pivotal in driving your team and your projects forward with vision and passion.

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