I’ve just come from off-site meeting with our client. We’ve been in beautiful place far away from both our and their offices with old, well-known “no access to e-mail and limited access to phone” message set in our brains. One of points on agenda was a brainstorming session. Its outcome was impressive and that’s not only my opinion.
We go through this kind of meetings with that very client on a regular basis and usually we don’t spring a surprise on us then. We know most of the rules of successful brainstorming meetings (link borrowed from Craig Brown), but when you mill the same knowledge of the same people yet another time, chances aren’t high that you’ll find a gem. This time it was different. Why? There were several crucial elements.
1. Get out of the office. Move from the conference room, notebooks, everyday small distracting issues. Let yourself forget about next meeting in ultimately filled conference room schedule. You need another quarter? You have it. You need to go out to catch some fresh air? No stress. Atmosphere becomes more informal and more creative too.
2. Do it differently. Forget flipchart. Take some photos from magazines, glue, a couple of markers and a pile of A1 sheets. Create a story. Don’t treat it deadly seriously. Play with ideas. Then present it to the rest of the people. You don’t have to hit the jackpot. You need to keep ideas flying all over the room.
3. Make a competition. Split people to several smaller teams. Give them time to prepare a couple of ideas, then make a series of presentations and let everyone to evaluate them. The best team wins. And everyone wins because you gain another stimulant to think creatively.
And after all it was a lot of fun. Of course that’s not the most important thing here, but from business perspective it was a meeting on steroids. I’m looking forward to implementation of some of today’s ideas. I believe one of them is a real gem.
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Julia Styles July 6, 2007 at 8:37 am
I like your brainstorming suggestions, and I wanted to add a few other tips we use at BrainReactions.
1. Quantity leads to quality, so don’t judge your ideas while you’re saying them. Wait until after the brainstorming to do that. Judgment-free spaces lead to the best brainstorms.
2. Capture your ideas. Write them on paper when they come into your head, but for official capture use an MP3 recorder, and then have someone transcribe the brainstorm.
3. Good questions are the generators of great ideas. If you are brainstorming for one challenge, try to come up with 10 questions that will generate ideas. For example: “What are ideas for new ways to brainstorm?” and then “What are ideas for tools we can use for brainstorming?” Start with wide or easy questions and funnel down to more specific and difficult questions. If you use this approach you should be able to come up with 100s of ideas.
4. Go Wide. Take your ideas in different directions. What are different attributes of your question/issue? Attributes could be method, message, material, technology, design, etc. We call these different attributes buckets.
5. Go deep. Fill those buckets with as many ideas as possible, and get as specific as possible on certain ideas.
6. Use your surroundings for inspiration. Look at objects, pictures, words, or a combination of the 3 to come up with new ideas.
7. Use metaphors. Some of the most successful innovations came from metaphors. For example, one of the first teeth-whiteners looked like white out for teeth. “13 going on 30″ was “BIG” for girls.
8. Think: “What would ______ say?”
Put in organizations or persons, and see what ideas you come up with. For example, “What would Google do?” or “What would Madonna say?”
9. Think out of this world. Think the impossible and someday it might be probable. In the meantime your impossible ideas can lead to plausible ideas by inspiring you to think outside the box.
10. Have fun!
BrainReactions is an outside innovation firm in Madison, Wisconsin. We often generate over 1000 ideas in a 2-hr session for our clients, and we always have fun doing it.
Pawel Brodzinski July 6, 2007 at 10:28 am
Nice list of advices, indeed. I think we’ve used 7-8 out of 10 this time.
My approach is that if anything leads to improve creativity it should be used. Usually changing the way you usually do brainstorming is enough and your list brings a lot of ideas how to make it different.
By the way: I didn’t know you can find firms which make “outsourced” brainstorming sessions (like BrainReactions). Personally, I think I wouldn’t consider hiring outside brainstormers.