How to Have Better Brainstorming Sessions
To keep your business relevant and to maintain growth, innovation is a necessity. You should always be questioning what you do and if you could do it better.
Hosting regular brainstorming sessions with your team is a great way to gain feedback from those at the frontline and hear their ideas for improving or developing the business.
In addition, it can also have a motivational effect on employees, by demonstrating that their input is important and that their thoughts are being heard.
Typically, brainstorming involves a team coming together around a table to discuss an issue and being asked to spontaneously contribute ideas, however, according to some creativity experts, prior thought and preparation could lead to even more effective sessions. Here’s how:
Step 1. Crystallise the issue to be brainstormed and your objectives
According to Ralph Keeney, an emeritus professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in the US, people often approach brainstorming with a gung-ho approach, before they even know what it is they are trying to achieve.
Before calling a group together, he says in a paper published in the journal ‘Decision Analysis’, whoever is leading the brainstorming should lay out exactly what the issue is and the objectives of any solutions. For example, perhaps you run a café and want to come up with new ideas for your menu. Now you need to set out the why, for example:
- Prevent existing customers from becoming bored
- Attract new customers
- Replace unpopular dishes
- Introduce options for customers with special dietary requirements
- Make the most of local/seasonal produce
- Make cost/time savings
Distribute this information to all session participants in advance so everyone is clear on the objectives that any suggestions must meet. For example, if the café is trying to keep overheads down, suggesting a prawn, salmon and avocado salad would not meet the stated objectives.
To ensure your brainstorming sessions achieves the right goals, go into as much detail as possible beforehand, Keeney advises.
Step 2. Seek ideas from individuals prior to meeting as a group
Keeney also suggests asking those who will be participating in the brainstorming group to submit their ideas first. He believes creative thinking is often stunted when a group “anchors” to another person’s solution and forgets about other ideas and objectives.
Other issues with spontaneous suggestions within a group setting have been highlighted in the paper ‘Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups’. Blocks to creativity were found to include the relationships between the team members i.e. employees not wishing to contradict their boss or suggest ideas they might not like. Another example is colleagues that don’t see eye-to-eye unwilling to build on one another’s ideas, or conversely, enthusing about someone’s idea in order to ally with them.
To ensure people don’t censor their ideas or are not otherwise influenced politically, collect ideas in advance and then present each one for discussion without indicating whose idea it is.
Step 3. Discuss and evaluate ideas in a group
Go through the pros and cons of each idea, specifically looking at how they meet the stated objectives. Establish the general consensus as to the idea’s potential/popularity and whether it warrants further investigation.
How could the idea be developed or improved? Allow participants to build on the suggestions and document all the points made. Keep a list of the ideas that got the thumbs up and those that were dismissed.
Step 4. Prioritise ideas
Once you have identified the workable ideas it’s time to assign them a priority ranking. Which ideas are likely to have the biggest impact? Which are the ‘quick wins’? And which are longer-term goals?
Ranking the brainstorming results helps to focus a team’s efforts to find workable solutions to the issue at hand. Brainstorming can lead to some excellent ‘big ideas’ but these can often be costly and complex. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be implemented, but the ‘low-hanging fruits’ that can bring about change quickly are often best prioritised to get things moving.
Step 5. Identify next steps
Now you have a ‘Top 5’ to focus on, discuss the steps to drive these ideas forward. List the tasks and allocate each one to a team member.
Try to set a timeframe for these tasks to be completed and then set another meeting to discuss progress made. Distilling ideas into actions is the best way to ensure that brainstorming will result in actual change and not simply a list of ideas, which gets put away and quickly forgotten about.
Download our ‘Better Brainstorming Template’ to get started
To help you approach brainstorming more strategically, we’ve produced a Word template to guide you.
You can alter the sizes of the boxes and tables to suit, depending on the scope of your project and how many people will be taking part in the brainstorming.
Since you will be seeking ideas prior to the session, you may want to request a specific number of suggestions from each participant. This will help people with lots of idea to decide which are the strongest, while those with limited ideas will be forced to push their creativity. It will also enable you to allocate sufficient time to discuss all the ideas during the session.
Once all ideas have been submitted, you can set them out on the template, providing you with a clear list to work through and a structure to follow.
The template also provides fields for actions and follow-ups, to help you see the process through to completion.
Download now!