Upward Brainstorming: How to Brainstorm Effectively with Your Team

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This is what happens in most brainstorming sessions:

Someone throws out an idea and then it gets picked to pieces. We light it on fire, burn it to the ground, and move on, “Nope, not that, any other ideas?”

That’s not an environment where people will throw out creative ideas and actually allow themselves to be creative.

When brainstorming sessions involve tearing ideas to shreds, you are essentially trading creativity for perfection and shutting down people's willingness to contribute. People will preemptively squash their own ideas before sharing them, knowing that their ideas will get torn apart. People will wait until they think their ideas are perfect before they share them, often resulting in silence.

“Half-baked ideas are critical for brainstorming; if we let them, bad ideas can inspire brilliant ones.”

Half-baked ideas are critical for brainstorming; if we let them, bad ideas can inspire brilliant ones. Adopt the simple concept of "Upward Brainstorming" with your team so you can generate more creative, innovative ideas.

What’s Upward Brainstorming?

Set aside an amount of time like 15 0r 20 minutes, etc. to actually do some brainstorming where people throw out ideas and you just put everything that comes out on the board.

Sounds a lot like regular brainstorming but here’s the key:

No one is allowed to criticize ideas during this time.

In upward brainstorming your only options are:

1. Build up, add onto, and “Yes, And…” ideas that have been shared.
2. Toss out new ideas.

Here are the ground rules:

No criticism, no judgment, no putting ideas down, no evaluating ideas; just purely creative space. If it comes up in someone’s brain, document it. In the process, give permission and encourage people to throw out things that are totally ridiculous and unrealistic in terms of budget, logistics, technological capabilities, etc. In other words, actually brainstorm.

“Very often, the idea that you wouldn’t have shared because you thought it was stupid or that people would shoot down, is just what’s needed.”

Very often, the idea that you wouldn’t have shared because you thought it was stupid or that people would shoot down, is just what’s needed. Often our own ideas (that we think suck) can inspire a brilliant idea from someone else.

Let there be no discussion about budgets or logistics or practicality. Just take the time you have set aside to toss out as many good, bad, and ugly ideas that you possibly can. And when people understand that they can only add ideas or build onto the ones that have already been shared, you’ll find that ideas have time to blossom and grow or get tweaked to be feasible even if they were originally impossible.

Once the time is up, then start sifting through ideas with a more critical lens to decide which ones the team likes most and move forward towards coming to a decision or taking next steps.

The result:

Instead of having a small handful of ideas to sort through, you’ll end up with a whole bunch of them. And even though a number of the ideas might be totally weird and ridiculous, the entire process will benefit from being more creative and innovative all around by not limiting people’s creativity. When people have permission to add ideas fearlessly, without criticism or judgement, it changes the way they contribute.

Keep in mind that you team’s capacity to do this well will grow over time. The first time you do this it will not be as fruitful as the fifth. Make it a habit and over time your team will get better and better as they earn trust with each other and get more comfortable with this process.

“For most people, you can’t share space with criticism and being truly, fearlessly creative at the same time.”

For teams to have effective brainstorming sessions, you can't set things up as “Let's throw out creative ideas, and destroy them the second they’re shared if they aren’t good enough.”

For most people, you can't share space with criticism and being truly, fearlessly creative at the same time. Set aside time for upward brainstorming and watch what happens.

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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop