This is the last entry in the brainstorming series, and this last phase is possibly the most important of all. For it is what happens after the brainstorming that matters most; taking ideas and tranforming them into strategies that lead to great products and services.

8. Separating the wheat from the chaff

At the end of your brainstorming session, you’ll hopefully have a couple of hundred ideas. But what now? Which of these 200 ideas are worth pursuing? There are a number of different approaches to identify the real contenders. If you have key stakeholders and decision-makers in the room for the brainstorming session, you can leverage that opportunity to whittle down the numbers. A very simple and straight-forward way is to conduct a poll where people vote on the ideas that have the most potential. At Artefact we have used a number of techniques in the past, from colored sticky dots to writing faux investment checks. While relatively straightforward, this approach has some significant drawbacks in that the ideas are being evaluated based on gut instinct and personal bias can sway the results significantly. And if you have a senior executive in the room, you can imagine how that might affect the voting.
Another approach is more systematic in nature and removes much of the personal bias from the process. By creating selection criteria that reflect the business objectives and consider other factors such as feasibility and schedule, you can develop a scoring system. Using this method you score each idea based on how well it maps to the criteria. Those that meet most of the criteria will score well and rise to the top, and those that score poorly will drop off. This is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process and it can be done during the group session or afterwards. But either way, you will have a list that is much smaller and more manageable.

9. After the (brain)Storm

Too often a brainstorming session is an end unto itself and there is no plan in place as to what happens next. A pile of sketches that sit on a desk is of zero value, and without the support of the stakeholders, your ideas are dead on arrival. If you have involved your stakeholders in the process, part of the battle is already won, for the stakeholders will have been a part of the process and they will have a sense of ownership of the ideas.
There is also the temptation to be protective of your output. This is important stuff, after all. But don’t be secretive. In fact, unless there is a specific reason for confidentiality, you want to do the opposite and take steps to get the ideas in front of as many people as possible. The ideas need to have life breathed into them and evangelized to those who matter. Pin up the unfiltered ideas on a hallway, or scan them in and post them on an internal web site.

10. Rinse & Repeat

As you can see, running a brainstorming session well requires a lot of work. The planning and preparing, the session itself, the evangelizing all take an inordinate amount of time. But this should not be a one-off event that happens in isolation. If you do a good job of documenting your process, you can use this as a template for future brainstorming efforts, or it can be shared with your colleagues in other groups. While you don’t want this to become a generic process that delivers a cookie-cutter experience, it is still something that can be repeated. With that in mind, think of it as a system that you develop and improve over time.