We have all run or participated in brainstorming sessions.
Most unfortunately don’t work or end in frustration.
I have been facilitating these for the past 15 years and here are my guidelines:
You want people to be engaged right from the start so set out clearly what you want to achieve and why it is important to you, the team and the organisation.
Ideally you want people close to the problem and some that are outside of it.
In particular ask for managers that deal with customers and partners so you have an external voice.
I like doing this because you start to get people involved and thinking about the challenge and they might just come up with a new idea.
My favourite pre-work is to randomly assign an unrelated business or brand to each person and ask them for at least one idea they we can borrow, adapt or learn from.
This expands the range of ideas and in the first few ideas if you have 10 people, you already start with 30 ideas!
Try and be as creative about the venue selection as you can.
For example, I was working on a kids brand so we ran the brainstorming session at a playground.
There is research that suggests that our mood impacts our creativity. So try and create a positive feeling in the group.
Don’t leave evaluation until the end.
Sometimes you run out of time which is a shame and by evaluating as you go you can sort out the high potential ideas and spend more time developing these.
With my Speed Thinking and Ideas Blitz tool I know that accelerating the pace at which the individual and group works can unlock greater creativity and stop filtering.
Too many brainstorming sessions end with a bunch of ideas that someone has to go and make sense of.
But the real goal of these types of sessions is to solve a problem rather than just create ideas for ideas sake.
You want participants to leave the session feeling engaged, energised and they have a clear view of what needs to be done, by whom.