There are two kinds of creative meetings — the brainstorm and the critique.

Don’t try to do both at once.

There are two kinds of creative meetings — the brainstorm and the critique. Don’t try to do both at once.

The purpose of the brainstorm is to create a million possibilities. The purpose of the critique is to refine ideas and sculpt them.

The Brainstorm

The brainstorm works best using improv philosophy — to everything that is said, you say, “Yes, and…”

There are no no’s in a brainstorm.

The brainstorm opens onto infinite alternatives, but infinite alternatives require elegant constraints. Unearthing infinite alternatives is next to impossible with vague questions like “What are your thoughts?” Instead, ask the question that gets to the heart of your objective. Ask for everything we know about a subject. Ask what our second cousins once removed would think. Ask for our wildest imaginations of what could be.

The Critique

The critique works best as a creative workshop — imagine an undergraduate seminar in architecture, photography, painting, creative writing. The creator offers up their piece and says nothing as introduction. We inhale the piece and exhale our experience of it. The creator listens as we talk about what works and what doesn’t work about the piece. This is not personal, this is about the work. This is about pushing the work to become the truest, most profound iteration of itself.

The critique is a place where we use the power of the collective to test our ideas by shining lights at them from our unique angles. By crashing our ideas up against against their weaknesses, we find ways to make them stronger. We grow stronger, too.

Best Practices

• The brainstorm and the critique cannot coexist in one meeting. Mixing them leads to the puncturing of ideas barely born before they have a chance to take flight and mean something real. Mixing them leads to endless black holes that validate and then revalidate a mediocre option without creating a pool of options against which you can measure it. Mixing the brainstorm and the critique is plain lazy.
• Decide before you schedule a creative meeting if it is a brainstorm or a critique.
• If you cannot figure out what kind of meeting you need, then you don’t need a meeting.
• And if you can figure out what kind of meeting you need, then you’re well on your way to a meeting that delivers.

Originally published on Medium.