Brainstorming - Friend or Foe?
Does this sound familiar?
A room filled with bowls of assorted colourful candy. Objectives written on a flip chart or white board. Fifteen of your colleagues sitting together; some excited, others staring at the clock waiting for the hour to pass. A junior employee stands at the front of the room capturing notes while his/her boss shouts what to write. One of your colleagues won’t shut up. He keeps repeating the same ideas over and over again. He also intimidates the more junior staff and shoots down all of their ideas. Your other colleague is hoarding the candy. Frustrated yet? Welcome to a typical agency brainstorm session.
Love them or hate them, brainstorms are an essential part of the ideation process. If done properly, they can generate new, fresh and innovative ideas that will make you and your company shine.
There are various methodologies or processes one could use in a brainstorm. I would recommend every person from your agency take a course to learn what these are. One of the most reputable, inspiring and FUN brainstorm workshops I’ve ever taken was through www.27marbles.com. I highly recommend you have them present to your company. I guarantee they will blow your mind.
I won’t take you through the methodologies in this blog because you really must experience them to put them into practice. What I can do is share five simple rules one should follow when conducting a brainstorm session.
1. Assign a facilitator to conduct the session. The role of this person is facilitation not participation. Participation may bias the group. Think about it. The next time you are facilitating a meeting ask the group to stick their pen in their ear. Chances are everyone will do it without question. You as the facilitator have the power to influence. Influencing the group is the last thing you want to do in a brainstorm session.
2. Assign someone to take the role of the “owner”. This person is responsible for creating the task for the session and for ensuring the overall outcome of the brainstorm session has met their needs.
3. Select different styles of thinkers and representatives to participate in your session. If you are brainstorming about a particular category i.e. Generation Y, invite people from that demographic. If you are brainstorming on customer service, invite someone who lives and breathes it. Perhaps invite a flight attendant. You get the point.
4. There is no magic number of participants to invite to a brainstorm session. Just remember though, it’s easier to turn around a corvette vs. a bus. Try to keep it to a maximum of 10 people.
5. Keep the ideas absurd. Stay away from providing tactical solutions. When you start thinking tactically, it means you already know how to execute. Select ideas that scare you and that you have no idea how to execute. If you already know how to execute these ideas, chances are your competition does too.
Most importantly, something you will hear me say at my work on a daily basis is “it’s easier to build feasibility into a new idea than newness into a feasible idea. “
