Building Better Brainstorming
Seven techniques to help you supercharge your team’s creativity, find innovative solutions, and look forward to your brainstorming sessions
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
— Maya Angelou
Everyone has experienced the World’s Worst Brainstorming Session. You’re in a meeting room with your coworkers and maybe your boss, staring at a blank whiteboard, trying to come up with something. You write down a couple of things. Then you all start talking about why the second one isn’t a good idea, or why the third one is. Your boss likes the fourth one, so you discuss that one too. Will it cost too much? Accounting points out we tried it before and it didn’t work. Is anything different this time? Well, nobody has any other ideas. End scene. See Why Group Brainstorming is a Waste of Time for more examples.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
“Brainstorming” as a technique was actually invented and popularized in the late 40s and early 50s by Alex F. Osborn, a Madison Ave advertising executive who wrote several books about it toward the end of his career. Over the past eighty years it’s become so popular that it’s now generic. Most people have no idea where it came from.
Its popularity means it has also been the focus of research since 1950, with 232,000+ articles and patents related to brainstorming and how to make it more effective. There has been huge progress. Unfortunately, these refinements aren’t being popularized by the chairman of one of the best advertising firms in the world, but at SMA we’ve spent quite some time researching and testing a set of creativity techniques that are very effective. They are not hard to use, they are backed by research, and they have helped our clients have billion-dollar ideas.
Quality is quantity
The most important and most surprising finding from all of that brainstorming research is that there is no secret for “better” ideas. The actual secret is more ideas. It has been empirically demonstrated, multiple times, that about 10–15% of all ideas in a session are good. A strong problem definition and a multidisciplinary team are the ingredients you need to have good ideas, but if you want more good ideas, you need to make the team have more ideas.
As you’ll see, this doesn’t have to take a lot of time, but it requires some changes in thinking. The team has to resist the urge to chase & discuss ideas as they come, focusing instead on recording them and moving on. You’ll come back to them later.
Find the right people
The first step is to make sure you have the right people in the room. We recommend adding some people with different expertise to your initial choices. Our brains work via association, and different experiences mean different associations. Some of the best ideas we have seen come from a “dumb question” from someone who isn’t an expert.
The second step is to make sure you have a guide, ideally a neutral guide. Someone needs to provide instructions and coordinate the group’s activities, especially with a group new to these techniques, and it is better for it to be a neutral party.
Defining the problem is half the solution
Once you have the group, don’t jump right into brainstorming. Make sure everyone really understands the problem or the goal you have. Try to break it down into smaller pieces, make the pieces more specific, and keep your eyes on the ball: what does the solution need to do. If you think about the problem in the same way you always have, you’ll come up with the same solutions. This is where techniques like the Five Whys, SWOT, function analysis, process diagrams, and so on can come in handy. Pre-existing analysis is useful, but we find it’s best to agree on your problem statement as a group.
Stretch, timebox, alternate
Motivating the group towards having more ideas is an art in itself. Two useful techniques here are stretch goals for the number of ideas, and introducing some artificial urgency via timeboxing. Research has shown that a goal that feels mildly impossible, perhaps 50% again over the number of ideas you’d typically get out of a session, will result in more ideas. You also want some time pressure; this helps to focus the team and also to provide some more motivation. Idea generation does not have to take a lot of time.
One of the key blocks to idea generation is actually literally getting time to speak. This is one reason we alternate between solo or pair time and small group time. It also helps with those who are uncomfortable speaking in front of the group.
Use sparks
After the first few, the team may feel “tapped out” of ideas. There are many techniques for driving associational thinking and helping the team consider multiple ways of approaching a problem, such as TRIZ, SCAMPER, random word association, using images, and referencing functions or components of the problem statement. We call these “sparks.” When the ideas start to die down, add a spark or two.
Ideas are lonely and like to be challenged
The initial generation of your big list of ideas is ideally “judgment free,” but leave a good amount of time for discussion, combination, and association. The team should review all the ideas and add enough detail for a third party to understand each idea. They can look for ways to put ideas together, or turn ideas around; they can decide some of the ideas won’t work but would work if we just changed one thing. Recent research indicates that discussion and even challenge actually makes for better ideas, and participants may continue to have new ideas even after the session is over. It’s not a bad idea to plan some breaks into the process so the team can think things over. The goal is a final list of ideas to feed into the selection process.
Democracy rules
The point of this entire exercise was to generate good ideas. Which of these ideas is worth pursuing? It’s important to have the group understand how selection will work ahead of time so this part can run smoothly. The research supports using the power of the team to select ideas as well as to generate them, as they are closest to the ideas and understand their implications. This is also a great time to refer back to the problem statement, to make sure that all aspects have been addressed. Simple voting, ranked choice, or some kind of holistic scoring selection process all work well. Once the team has selected preferred ideas, the organization may want to involve senior leadership in the final decision; the important part is having the team do the initial winnowing.
The Takeaway
To recap:
- Laser focus on getting more ideas.
- Bring in alternate perspectives
- Spend solid time defining your problem statement
- Plan for some solo or pair work, give your team stretch goals for the number of ideas, and time them
- For extra credit, toss in some associational thinking techniques (“sparks”)
- Save time for review, argument, and discussion of your list of ideas
- Have the team select preferred ideas before you get management involved
You can use any one of these techniques at a time, but they are even more powerful when put together. They scale from a three-person session to massive workshops of 70+ or more, and they consistently result in innovative, implementable ideas with built-in champions who are eager to see them carried out. Give them a try. No one should sit through another World’s Worst Brainstorming Session.
