7 Steps for EFFECTIVE Brainstorming Sessions
Hi there, it’s Laura.
This week I want to break down the 7 steps to run a successful brainstorming session. Anyone who ever thought “oh it’s just a brainstorm, I don’t need to prepare for this” I’m sure, at one point, got hit in the face with the harsh reality that they did, in fact, have to prepare. In order to avoid wasting a lot of man hours for not a lot of output, these are the things I do when I have to schedule a brainstorming session:
Do the Pre-Work
Decide on the outcome - A useful thing to do is decide before going in is what you want to achieve with this brainstorming. Since green field exploration is difficult, having some direction is crucial. Some examples of outcomes can be:
Improve a process, a working relationship,
Find new opportunities
Ranks priorities
Discuss team pain points and decide what to do with them
Decide on the participants - This is a crucial part and key to a good outcome of your brainstorming. While for some it might be obvious what teams need to be involved, let me give you a litmus test to run through. Think about the process that you’re trying to gather more information on and ask yourself “what are the teams being touched by this process?”. This way you make sure you don’t miss critical upstream or downstream dependencies that might totally shift the outcome of your brainstorming session.
Create or gather the materials - Especially if the session will include more than two teams or types of jobs, it’s useful to prepare some material to bring everyone up to date. There’s no hard rule as to what these materials should be but here are some ideas:
Project documentation,
Process flow diagram ,
Data flow diagram,
Write up of the issue so far, highlighting the current state
Open questions to date
Proposal for a discussion starting point
Inform the participants - Needless to say, you have to tell people that you’ll be running a brainstorm and why their participation is important. Stress that you need their input in order to make sure that going forward, all teams are aligned. You should also tell them what the outcome of the session is, in order for them to better understand what will be expected from the gathering. Also, if you’re going to block a full day for the session, you might have to schedule it 2-3 weeks in advance in order to make sure that people can make it.
2. Have a Casual Beginning
When you have a day-long brainstorming or when many of the participants have not met each other before, it’s generally a good idea to have a casual and fun beginning to the day. If you have new joiners or the teams haven’t met before, it’s useful to start with a round of introductions so that everyone has context as to what teams are contributing to the outcome. Additionally, it can be fun to have a team building exercise to kick things off and get people energised.
Some examples of team building exercises can be:
Everyone saying two truths and a lie about themselves, other trying to guess what the lie is
Preparing a few riddles and ask the participants to guess the answer
Everyone asking the person to their left a “would you rather” question
Everyone says their favorite ice cream flavour
Everyone states what super power they would want
And so on.
3. Present the Rules
I am aware that this might sound like you’re running a kindergarten class but let me assure you, a bunch of corporate workers in a room also need rules to make sure things go smoothly. Things you should think about deciding:
Are laptops allowed? If yes, consider that your participants might get lost in answering emails or doing their day to day work instead of paying attention to the session. If you try to instate a “no laptop” rule and you’re getting pushback, think about scheduling some email breaks instead.
Will there be breaks? If you’re running a day-long session, it might be useful to schedule some breaks for people to reset, get some coffee, go out for a smoke or grab a snack. You’ll also need a bigger lunch break, which should be aligned with the options around. This means if there’s no cafeteria and the nearest place that has food is 15 mins away, setting a 30 min lunch break means you’re already running late.
Is criticizing ideas allowed? A lot of brainstorming sessions impose a “non-evaluation” stance when the ideas are being generated in order to make sure that you get the most out of your participants. This is a useful rule to instate and, in case of pushback, you can also introduce a voting system to decide the path forward.
Are unicorn ideas welcome? You might find that some of your coworkers have totally green field ideas that are extremely ambitious and potentially difficult/impossible to achieve. It’s good to set expectations about the type of suggestions you want. For example, you can propose to the room that you only generate ideas that can be achieved in the next 6 months.
You can of course have whatever rules fit the outcome and the group you’re working with. Write a comment if you swear by a particular rule that has helped you so far!
4. Generate Ideas Efficiently
Generating ideas is the bread and butter of the brainstorming sessions and from what I’ve seen, there are two popular ways to do it: brain writing or shouting. Brain writing refers to a technique that involves giving every participant sticky notes and pens and asking them to write down their suggestions to what is being explored. Shouting means there’s only one person writing down the suggestions on a whiteboard and everyone else just voices their opinions. There are pros and cons to each of these. For example, brain writing makes sure that even the introverted participants have an opportunity to express their opinion but on the downside, you’ll have a lot of repetitive ideas that you have to sort through at the end. Similarly, shouting makes it easier to group ideas by topic and avoid the same thing being repeated, but it might discourage people from voicing an opinion they think is controversial. You should decide on the approach that you want but, if you go for the shouting option, make an effort to ensure that everyone is included.
Here’s an additional tip: if your brainstorming session is simply a 1h session with 1 to 2 teams, I found it very useful to actually have a starting point already defined. This is something I often use in order to make sure that we make the most of the limited time we have at hand. It’s a tool to drive consensus a bit faster since, as Murphy’s law teaches us:
People are much quicker to correct someone that is wrong than to answer a question unprompted.
This tool is also great when you have a clearly defined outcome in mind and there is not a lot of greenfield exploration needed.
Let me give you an example from my own experience. I was working on defining the columns for a report, working with several teams to get alignment. I set up a meeting and opened the conversation by saying I already did some thinking and I want to gather feedback on how the structure can be improved. Then I presented structure and we went around the room, hearing each participant on what they want to see differently as well as answer any questions. This way, I made sure that participants who don’t want to engage openly in the discussion can just agree with what is presented. This brings consensus a lot sooner than asking everyone to express what they would want to see and avoids the “quiet room” situation if your participants haven’t formed an opinion just yet.
5. Be Mindful of Timing
This tip is intended for sessions that take more than a couple of hours. When you’re creating the schedule for the session, especially if you have to discuss multiple topics, try to understand how much time you want to dedicate per session. This will give you a sense if you are running over or early with the discussions. You should also choose topics that are nice to discuss, but can be sacrificed in case more important discussions are running long.
Naturally, during the day, the energy of your participants will diminish. There’s not much you can do about it but you can work around it. Make sure you schedule the most important talking points in the morning. This way, participants can be engaged and you can get a quality brainstorm going. After lunch or past 4pm, try to schedule lighter topics where you don’t necessarily need every single person in the room to reach an outcome.
6. Gather the Input and Notes
The least glamorous part of any brainstorming session has to be gathering everything and arranging it in a way that makes sense. Depending on how you organised, either you have been taking ad-hoc notes during the meeting or you asked 1-2 people to help take notes during the session. Either way, you need to put these in human readable format and also in a flow that reflects the session. If you choose the brain writing method, you will need to collect the sticky notes but also make sure you remember how they were placed. I found the easiest way to ensure this is to take a picture of the board before touching the notes. Similarly, if you wrote things on a white board, take a picture where the writing is legible and copy the text into a document.
7. Share the Outcome
As I’ve mentioned in my video on driving successful meetings, a sure way to make a meeting feel like a waste of time is to have no actions come from it. Since you’re the organizer, everyone will be looking at you to prevent that from happening.
The very first step to avoiding the feeling of wasted time is to share the meeting notes. Try to send them out within a week of the sessions taking place, in order to keep momentum.
The second step is to have follow-up action items and owners. Ideally these would have been agreed on during the meeting and they won’t be a surprise. You will also have to follow up on the action teams if the owners don’t provide updates unprompted or ask for help from a project or program manager to push forward the work.
What are some of the tips that you use to run effective brainstorming sessions? I’m very curious to find out!
That’s it for today, folks.
Until next time, this is Laura signing off.
