6 Tips to Supercharge Your Next Brainstorming Session
In a team environment, brainstorming offers an opportunity to not just solve a problem, but to also encourage and enhance greater collaboration of all team members. Done well, brainstorming can have a huge effect on how you approach business problems and the quality of derived solutions.First explored in Madison Avenue executive Alex Osborn's 1953 book "Applied Imagination," brainstorming has evolved ever since its earliest use. Much like there are no wrong ideas developed in a brainstorming session, there are no wrong ways to approach brainstorming. Quite often, how a team uses this creative tool changes from the first attempt to subsequent ones. When you find the formula which works best for your public relations or marketing team, that is the formula to use as a foundation for future sessions.
Below are six suggestions for supercharging your next brainstorming session. While these tips may change things for your group a bit, change is often good. Go with what works and continue developing your style of brainstorming to raise the bar of creative quality with each subsequent session.
Tip One: Arrange for your brainstorming session to occur in mid-morning, on the least hectic day of the week.
By scheduling in mid-morning, you bypass the early morning rush of answering voicemails and opening first emails of the day. Around 10 o'clock a.m., most people have settled in for the day, read their emails, answered calls and figured out their game plan for their day. With this done, their mind can function better toward collective focus. Try to avoid mid-afternoon brainstorming, as this is when most people go through a drowsy creative slump. Fridays or other days when your team is least stressed are best for brainstorming, as they are in a more open mindset and mood. Open minds and good moods produce better ideas.Tip Two: Schedule the brainstorming session with an extra 15 minutes on the clock.
Before having them gather in the session's meeting space, tell your team that the first fifteen minutes are provided for them to do whatever they prefer, to clear their minds of clutter. This may be going for a walk around the building for fresh air, making a personal phone call, playing a video game on their phone or just taking a cat nap. Regardless of what they choose to do, discourage any form of work completion during this 15 minutes. Enforce mind clearing, not addition of other stress or work. When the 15 minutes are over, gather everyone together to get started.Tip Three: Provide food and drinks during the session.
Place open containers of food on the table in front of your team, as well as bottles of water or preferred beverages. This can be done to bring up everyone's blood sugar. Low blood sugar can kill the best creative thought processes, as the body becomes sluggish and takes the mind with it. Get your team pumped on sugar, carbs, veggie platters, fruit or whatever it takes to get them through the mid-morning slump or drowsiness. Wake them up through nutrition and get that blood flowing.Tip Four: Abandon the whiteboard...for a moment.
Before the meeting, encourage members of your team with smartphones or tablets to download an app designed to facilitate "solo brainstorming." Why solo brainstorming? We will get to that, next. There are some great apps to help open minds up and prime them for release of brilliance. If they do not have a smartphone or tablet, or they just prefer to not download an app, using Pinterest to create a themed mood board can also inspire.Tip Five: Have the brainstormers work solo on their apps, Pinterest board, computer or notepad to initially brainstorm alone for about 15 minutes.
Provide plenty of time for this and discourage too much interaction. Reinforce that "there are no bad ideas." Encourage free writing and just letting things flow onto their device or paper, stating that even a bad idea will spawn potentially better ones. Ensure everyone progresses and provide individual encouragement as needed. However, do not look over shoulders, check on progress or otherwise add to the pressure. Just let them eat, drink and scribble.Tip Six: Explore individual ideas on the whiteboard.
When time is over for individual idea development, start exploring each participant's ideas by asking for what they consider their best ideas first. By launching into the group brainstorm using the best of each person's ideas, you cut out the most unproductive, uncreative and derailing aspects of brainstorming. Those negatives are usually derived of quick starts with the group packing together on what will later prove to be an unfruitful idea and time waster. Going with the best first, person by person around the table, ensures each person has a voice and their ideas have a solid chance to urge even bigger group ideas, with greater verve and creative consideration. This is essentially cutting out the riff-raff.Because your team has been relaxed, fed, energized, immersed in thought before bouncing creative ideas all over the room and heard equally, these six tips for supercharging your next brainstorming session will garner best results.
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