A WILDLY CREATIVE GUIDE TO BETTER BRAINSTORMING
Ever been in one of those brainstorms?
The kind where:
The loudest voice dominates
Everyone else sits in silence, minds blank
One person shares “the good ideas” (again)
Everyone else sits there and just feels a bit useless
Brainstorms for the most part rarely work. And if you’ve ever experienced the mounting pressure to generate the next brilliant idea on demand as your mind draws a complete blank, surrounded by the intolerable silence as everyone else’s does the same, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.
When I worked in-house at creative agencies, brainstorms were of course a regular fixture. But even there, where creativity was meant to be our superpower, brainstorming was certainly not.
Why?
Well, because everyone was expected to think creatively, but nobody was ever thinking creatively about the brainstorm itself. Nobody was thinking about the conditions that creativity needs to thrive. They expected brilliant ideas without nurturing the environment that helps them grow.
The reality?
Creativity wasn’t thriving, it was stalling, becoming blocked and inhibited. Not due to a lack of creative potential in the room but due to the brainstorm being broken in the first place.
In the years since then, I’ve continued to witness broken brainstorms in varying degrees and with alarming, regularity prompting me develop A Wildly Creative Guide to Better Brainstorming. Here you’ll find the 6 simple steps, creative interventions, small but meaningful invitations that encourage better brainstorming by cultivating the conditions for creativity to thrive.
Ready?
Then let’s dive in…
1. Frame the Challenge
One of the most common pitfalls with brainstorming actually happens before the brainstorm itself. And typically, that’s because nothing does happen.
Usually little or no preparation goes into a brainstorm, with the common misconception being that they just run themselves. And it’s true, broken brainstorms do run themselves, (hence why they’re broken) effective creatively rich brainstorms, do not.
Perhaps one of the reasons this is such a common mistake comes down to another one, rarely is anyone in charge, creatively spearheading the session. There is no brainstorm lead or facilitator. Yes, you have the organiser, the initiator who sent out the calendar invites, but that’s not the same as having a dedicated lead, designing the session, optimising the outcomes.
A fruitful brainstorm needs this type of ringleader, someone who takes ownership of preparing not only the session but the participants who will be attending it. Without this, the brainstorm will lack cohesive direction, ideas will float aimlessly, energy and enthusiasm will wain or result in confusion and the session will end with everyone feeling frustrated that their precious time has been wasted. Understandably so.
A better brainstorm starts by anchoring the session in purpose and direction. A better brainstorm starts by Framing the Challenge!
Here are a few simple ways you can do that:
Identify what the challenge is by distilling the brief into a simple, clearly articulated sentence or two (no more) and then circulate it to all the those attending.
Establish the objective for the brainstorm, in other words what’s the overall goal based on that brief? Share this too.
Define the deliverables, what the tangible outcomes the brainstorm needs to deliver? Know and communicate this in advance.
Share any key information, context, constraints or insights beforehand. Give people the opportunity to mull things over.
Remember, brainstorms tend to be juicier when people come feeling personally prepared. It creates engagement in the session and investment in the outcome. Consider if there a mini creative assignment that might spark initial ideas, supporting and strengthening the brainstorm itself.
2. Prime your People
When we arrive at brainstorm, whether that be in person or online the first thing that usually happens?
Idea chucking.
Typically, everyone starts trying to come up with that Big Idea right from the get-go. Haphazardly throwing ideas around hoping one of them might just be The One.
There tends to be very little preamble, almost certainly no warm up, and definitely no creative acclimatisation, just straight down to business, always results orientated. Now I understand this might be how business works but this is not how the business of creativity works.
In a brainstorm it’s the journey (AKA the process) that defines the destination. The more interesting, imaginative, expansive and unexpected that journey is, the more it will be reflected in the results. Bypassing that journey by jumping straight to the destination compromises the creative potential in the room and it compromises the creative opportunity waiting to be discovered.
To get to the best creative results from any brainstorm, you have to embrace the process, and you can only embrace that process if your people are primed with the right attitude and approach to do so. Otherwise, ideas stay guarded, energy stays low, voices go unheard and all the creative potential in the room stays untapped and unrealised.
This is why, we need to Prime our People, people.
This step is about creating a space where everyone feels safe to show up, to speak up, to take creative risks, to allow themselves be vulnerable, to play, to experiment, to unapologetically get it wrong, to let go of inhibitions and share their half-baked ideas with gusto.
This doesn’t happen by chance, it happens through intention, through facilitation, often through permission, and through readying your people for the creative process ahead.
A few simple ways you can Prime your People:
Design (and ideally disrupt) the space. Consider what changes can you make to cultivate a more creatively friendly environment.
Usually, people come from one meeting into the next carrying all the mental energy, chaos, clutter and actions from the last. Take a moment at the start of your brainstorm to include a short exercise to bring people into the present. This, in a corporate setting will disrupt the hell out of everyone.
Introduce a few, Rules of Engagement that everyone agrees to from the start. This encourages positive and open collaboration from the start feel and gives participants the permission to lean into the process.
Run a short warm up to help people find their voice, fire up their imagination and stretch their creative muscles, acclimatising them to the brainstorm environment.
3. Flip the Format
Take a second to think back to your last brainstorm. Do you remember how it was structured? Or was it structured?
Typically, there is no format to a brainstorm, it’s an unstructured block of time, which is the equivalent of a creative black hole. Instead of sparking the imagination, the looseness and lack of structure actually stifle it.
If the purpose of a brainstorm is to generate creative thinking, which of course it is, then the brainstorm itself needs to facilitate and support creative thinking. It needs some form of structure to optimise the creative outcome.
We need to move away from that vacuous creative black hole and flip the format into a more guided and curated experience for participants. One that introduces pockets of activity aligned with the creative goal while supporting creative exploration and discovery. A format that supports different creative styles within the group, and one that incorporates a variety of approaches and exercises to illuminate those styles. A format that in and of itself is imaginative and creatively rich, diverse and engaging. Because when we design and shape the format to look like this, the format will shape the creative results that emerge.
A few simple ways you can do this:
Reimagine your brainstorm and structure the session in advance, using this guide as framework.
Allocate time to activities and make sure those activities serve the overall goal
Rather than spend the whole brainstorm as one large group, introduce breakouts; small groups, pairs, or even some solo storming, then come back together and let everyone share the highlights.
A timer turns overthinking into instinct. Introduce time constraints to spark creative urgency.
Introduce gamification or digital poling
Curate the experience so that it feels creative and imaginative
4. Shift the thinking
Safe and familiar ways of thinking are the kryptonite of any brainstorm.
When we default to our habitual thinking patterns we end up with predictable and uninspired solutions. Ideas feel recycled, not new and original.
Flipping the format creates the fertile soil for fresh thinking to grow but on its own, it’s not actually enough.
We need to shift everyone’s thinking, disrupting those automated patterns, that aren’t serving or supporting the creative goal, and get everyone thinking differently. Or put another way, thinking creatively. It’s kind of the whole point, right?
This leads me to what is perhaps one of my biggest bugbears with brainstorming and why I believe most of them to be inherently broken. It comes down to this one particular but fundamental flaw.
An effective brainstorm is reliant upon its participants thinking creatively but nobody is ever taught how to do that. How do we think creatively? How do we think differently?
Which, when you think about, is exceptionally unfair. It’s expecting people to know something they don’t and rather than helping them, or giving them the tools to learn, we insist they sit there not knowing until by some miraculous intervention, they suddenly do.
It’s madness and it’s never going to work.
This doesn’t aid or promote creative discovery; it strips people of their creative confidence and destroys it. It doesn’t result in creative breakthroughs, it causes creativity to breakdown.
For a brainstorm to unlock creative thinking, we need to start by giving people the keys. This happens when we introduce tools, techniques and exercises that are specifically designed to help people think differently. These are the keys that will help people access their creativity more freely and fully, these are the keys that will spark fresh thinking and deliver exciting results.
Simply expecting creative thinking is wishful thinking, people need to be shown how.
A few simple ways you can Shift the Thinking:
Explore the different modes of thinking that disrupt habitual and automated patterns, and try to incorporate them into your brainstorm format.
Play with creative constraints, first by enforcing them to unlock creative thinking, then by removing them entirely, freeing it.
Add a creative catalyst or stimuli to spark people’s imaginations and get the creative juices flowing, this could be a physical prop, a piece of text, an image, a creative solution that already exists.
Introduce the power of ‘what if’ to shift thinking in different, unpredictable directions
5. Stretch & Strengthen
A common frustration with brainstorming, is not necessarily down to a lack of ideas, but rather a lack of ideas that have the desired depth or substance.
Often, we spend so much time focusing on quantity we neglect quality, meaning we produce surface-level-ideas, that just don’t quite hit the spot.
Of course, we need the quantity in order to discover the quality, so uninhibited, raw divergent thinking is essential and must come first but unless that’s the sole outcome you’ve agreed upon, (this should be determined in framing the challenge) you’ll want to make time within your format to Stretch and Strengthen some of your ideas.
This is where creative rigour comes in to play, because without taking the time to interrogate ideas and measure them against the brief, they can easily lack the desired insight and impact.
Stretch & Strengthen is all about identifying the sparks that show potential and developing those selected ideas further, shaping them into something with more substance and depth. This is not about the end game and leaving the brainstorm with a fully formed, refined and finished idea, ones that are ready to be ‘shipped’ and put out into the world. Not at all. This is simply about strength testing what you’ve come up with, unearthing more of its potential to determine its true viability.
A few simple ways you can Stretch and Strengthen your ideas :
Get comfortable choosing. To do justice to one idea you have to abandon the rest (at least initially).
Know what makes a good idea in the first place. How can you choose the good ones, if you don’t know what criteria you’re measuring them against?
Challenge your favourite ideas.. Ask:
What makes this idea strong – where is it working?
Where is it weakest – where is it not working?
What’s missing – where and how can we add more value?
6. Close with Clarity
And finally, the last step, in this guide to better brainstorming, is all about closure and ending your brainstorm well, on propose and with intention.
Often, that’s not quite what happens.
The end of a brainstorm usually falls into one of two categories. It ends abruptly, because time has run out before anything tangible was discovered let alone agreed. Or it ends awkwardly because that’s been the nature of the entire experience to begin with. On some unfortunate occasions it might well be a combination of both. Either way, people are left feeling slightly bamboozled, wondering what just happened, what was the point, what contribution did they actually make and perhaps most significantly what is supposed to happen next…God forbid it’s another brainstorm?!
A better way of brainstorming is to close with clarity and making sure the session itself feels resolved and concluded, with tangible outcomes and agreed actions moving forward.
Creative thinking requires us to play in the heady heights of our imaginations and commit to staying there for as long as necessary, but an effective brainstorm ensures that by the time it ends, everything and everyone is anchored back, firmly in the here and now. Moving them from abstract back to concrete, from untethered wandering to clear rooted action. Earthing those creative sparks back in solid ground.
The ideation phase is only one element of the creative process. For creative results to be realised, action and application take centre stage. This is often what confuses people about the creative process, because this integral phase, feels distinctly uncreative and yet it’s as essential as coming up with the ideas in the first place. And this is why; we need to use the final moments of any brainstorm to effectively implement this transition. Successfully moving the creative process along with everyone involved, from ideation into project management.
This is the necessary time to swiftly and succinctly recap and review the session, distilling the brainstorm down into the key discoveries, synthesising the big ideas to help people make sense of them, and then translating them in tangible and practical next steps that can be assigned and actioned by everyone.
This is ending a brainstorm with clarity.
A few simple ways you can do this:
Leave sufficient time at the end of your brainstorm for this to be possible
Get everyone involved, invite feedback and reflections
Refer back to Frame the Challenge and use it as a checklist
Have we met /answered the brief?
Has the goal of the brainstorm been carried out?
Have we achieved the deliverables?
Get clear on the next steps, make them actionable, give them a deadline and assign them.
So, this is it, your Wildly Creative Guide to Better Brainstorming.
I hope you can use these interventions and invitations, to start unlocking more creative potential, freedom and fun in your next brainstorm, so that in turn, your team’s creativity can become your company’s superpower.