The Perfect Brainstorm

Ideas here are not “my own” but they are ideas which I strongly believe in!
Lessons in creativity from IDEO, America’s leading design firm.

The ideas below are inspired from the book The Art of Innovation – Tom Kelly with Jonathan Littman.

You can deliver more value, create more energy, and foster more innovative solutions through better brainstorming. If you want to keep in shape, you have to exercise your brainstorming muscle more often ( than once a month ).


The seven secrets of better brainstorming:


1. Sharpen the Focus:
Good brainstorming starts with a perfect statement of the problem. This can be as simple as a question. A brainstorming without a proper problem statement is like a company without a clear strategy. A good problem statement helps in getting the people back into track easily. It avoids wasting a lot of energy wandering aimlessly.


The problem should not be too open like “how can we make a better feature than a company X”. At the same time the problem should not be too narrow and already presume you know the answer like “how can we provide IM offline messages to mobile via SMS”.
“How can we accelerate the time-to-first result for customers search engine via dial-up modem” could uncover innovations that could potentially yield competitive edge on what you are looking for.


2. Playful rules
One of the worst things that can hamper a brainstorming session in criticizing and debating on ideas that comes up. This can break the energy of the session pretty quickly. The facilitator should be good in turning aside critiques without putting off the critiquers completely. Stick the walls of conference rooms with rules of brainstorming written prominently. The facilitator could ring bell when participants try to turn a brainstorming into a normal meeting


3. Number your ideas
Numbering the ideas that bubble up during brainstorming helps in two ways. First it motivates the participants before and during the brainstorming session. “Let’s try and get 100 ideas before we leave the room” as an example.
Second it’s a great way to jump back and forth from idea to idea without loosing the track of where you are.


4. Build and jump
High energy barnstormers often follow a series of steep “power” curves. The momentum builds slowly, then intensifies and then starts to flatten. The facilitator should nurture an emerging conversation with a light touch in the first phase and know enough to let ideas to flow when it intensifies. When energy fades, the facilitator should switch gears and try to get the next steep curve of energy by introducing small variations.


5. The space remembers
Write the flow of ideas in the medium visible to the whole group. This is not capturing meeting notes but capturing ideas so that the group can see the progression and return to those that seem worthy of more attention. The space should not be small so it makes you to erase ideas to make room for new ones. As you rapidly capture ideas, make a mental note of ones that are worth coming back to during the build and jump. When you return to the spot on the board/wall where the ideas are captured, spatial memory will help people to recall the mind-set they had when the ideas first emerged.


6. Stretch your mental muscles
Time is short and people are busy. It’s worthwhile to burn some time in warm-up. It helps in certain circumstances when the group has not worked together before, when the group has doe not brainstorm frequently or when the group seems distracted by pressure or an unrelated issue.
One type of warm-up is to do some content-related homework. Many a times it has proved that the group that did content-related homework before a brainstorm definitely out performed a group that came that comes to brainstorming session cold.


7. Get physical
Good brainstormings are extremely visual. They include sketching, mind mapping, diagrams and sticky figures. The best brainstorms are often physical. They move beyond the two dimension and push the three. Move around, get things to the table, and get competitive products, promising technologies that could be applied to the problem.


Try these 7 secrets and you will start seeing better results faster.
Follow them meticulously and you will be a “brainstorming” master!

Good luck!