This is the second part in a three part series on brainstorming fundamentals.

5. Hey you! Outta the box!

Approaching the task head-on with “give me some new ideas for our next generation of widgets” is going to be met with high anxiety, blank stares and blank pieces of paper. When charged with generating ideas, the task needs to be approached from different angles. Not everyone can naturally think outside the box (Yes, I just said “thinking outside the box”. Deal with it), so they need to be pushed outside the box. This is the key to generating successful output.

There are many, many approaches that will yield a variety of results. However, the purpose of this post is not to provide a comprehensive review of the pros and cons for the various approaches, but rather to highlight the need for the right type of stimulus for the session.

One way to do this is to build a matrix that will force the group to make new connections. The pivots may be themes, trends, contexts, or personas. For example, say you are brainstorming a new mobile application, the table may look something like this:

Theme: Health & well-being
In this case, you would explore the ideas around health + location awareness + the car. The mind can’t help but forge connections, and this is the space where creativity thrives.
In the above matrix, there are nine possible combinations that can be explored. If you have five themes, you now have 45 possible areas to explore. In reality, you would rarely explore every cell in the matrix, but rather pick and choose the ones that hold the most promise. If you brainstorm 10 combinations for five minutes each, you have filled an hour already.

6. Unplug-n-Play

Removing distractions

Another reason to get out of the boardroom is to get people into a different state of mind. That means disconnecting people from their normal responsibilities and all of the associated distractions, such as email, phone calls and the lure of the web. Until recently, this was handled by banning laptops, but with the advent of smart-phones and ubiquitous internet connections, it is harder to capture and hold the attention of your audience. But be prepared with the fall-out as your participants struggle to make it through an hour or two without an email fix. You will likely be met with expressions not unlike the gentleman pictured here.

7. Rules of engagement

With so much effort having gone into the planning of the session, you don’t want to screw it up with some lousy execution. Here are some pretty well established ground rules that will help you run the session effectively.

Stacking the deck“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”
Linus Pauling.
Brainstorming is a game of odds. No matter how talented your participants and how rich the stimulus, odds are that 90% of your ideas are non-starters for whatever reason. Of the remaining 10%, maybe one or two are going to be worthwhile pursuing. That means you’ll need to generate 100 ideas in the hope of having an idea or two worth taking to the next level. But that’s OK, especially if you only need one great idea. But as a game of odds, you can increase your chances by upping the sheer number of ideas that you generate. If you have ten people in your brainstorming session, and each person offers up one idea every five minutes, that will yield 120 ideas over the course of an hour. Double it if you go for two hours. Buried in there will be a few gems.

Picture this…
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a quick sketch is worth at least a couple hundred. By sketching out ideas you can communicate the concept much more efficiently than by text alone. We usually include a one line description along with a rough sketch. The other benefit is that a sketch provides a visual aid for filtering large amounts of ideas. When these are posted on a wall, they can be easily scanned, parsed, and filtered.

But keep in mind, not everyone feels comfortable putting their artistic skills on display. To ease the anxiety, you can assign a sketch artist (assuming you have access to one) to each of the groups to capture the ideas. This takes the burden off the team members and allows them to focus on the “idea” part of the exercise.

Short is good
As attention spans grow shorter (as indicated by Twitter and the 140 character limit), it becomes tougher to hold an audience for an extended period of time. For the actual brainstorming exercise itself, keep it to 90 minutes or less. Go more than 90 minutes and the fatigue will kick in and creativity and productivity will start to decline.

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours
Often one idea will spark another, and the more ideas you share, the more you will generate. Each new idea will forge a new connection for the next person, and so you can start to build on ideas. So at the end of each round of brainstorming, each person holds up their paper and provides a one-sentence description. If it takes more than one sentence to describe, there’s a good chance the idea is too complex.

That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard
If you want people to clam up or to sulk their way through the session, then go ahead and encourage unbridled criticism of ideas as they are presented to the group. However, if you want to provide an environment that is going to allow for truly creative ideas to flourish, then you need to defer judgment. Because some of those off-the-wall ideas may end up sparking someone else to something truly inspired.

Up Next: What happens after the brainstorming.