I have to say that I'm somewhat surprised by the negative comments on brainstorming here. Perhaps people have only been in crappy meetings which are superficially called brainstorms but are really excuses for a manager to ram their ideas through?
In my experience, a good brainstorming session will usually result in a few useful ideas. It's too easy to get stuck with a limited set of solutions while trying to solve design or engineering problems if you just go off on your own and think about it. Certainly there are types of problem solving which need dedicated heads-down focus, but when you're at the stage where you're trying to make major architectural decisions, it's way too easy to jump to the first thing which makes sense to you and not consider enough alternatives.
There's definitely an art to running a good brainstorm meeting. You can search for various brainstorm rules or ideas, but a few which have been helpful:
1. Sometimes it can be good with a complex topic to assign a little homework where participants bring in a few ideas, samples, props, or bits of research to the meeting. If this isn't practical, a 5-10 minute quiet study session at the beginning of the meeting can help.
2. Letting people sketch out a bunch of ideas on post-its for 5 minutes in silence and then going around the room to share the ideas can help avoid the tendency of some people to dominate the meeting, and others to never share anything. It's also helpful if your group is too large for a more free flowing sharing pattern (more than 5-8 people).
3. A warm up throw-away exercise can be useful with teams that aren't used to brainstorming or brainstorming together.
4. If anyone's ever stuck, asking the simple question of what is the opposite of something can break that brain freeze. There may not be a literal opposite, but the general concept can help people turn problems upside-down or inside-out or what ever needs to happen to free up your thinking.
5. Always try to get some people who aren't deeply embedded in the project/problem to help shake up the thinking.
Point three is why I alway open a brainstorming session with one or two ideas roughly in the theme of “shut it all down”. Sometimes it’s “what if it also poisoned people? Then they can’t complain.” Other times is “we could just not? How bad could it really be?”
It’s important to prevent people thinking their ideas are foolish. Running a good brainstorming session is a skill just like running a good scrum, it’s not just another generic meeting and a lot of people try to think you can “just brainstorm”.
Experience has taught me that first improvisation skills help, because at least when I’m the first idea gathering phase you really need to both “yes, and” all the ideas being presented you also have to try and avoid “shutting down the scene” in that you want a good flow of ideas and until you start trying to select the useful apps you don’t want anyone’s behaviour to steer other people from sharing ideas they may have.
Second, if you’re the only one with any improv skills you’re also the one best equipped to “play the fool” and relentlessly suggest outrageous things and make sure they are placed on the board, to make sure everyone else is more likely to think “my ideas are better than that” and then you can encourage others to share those better ideas.
Also a brainstorming session doesn’t need to be an extrovert party. You can run one semi-asynchronous via slack it just takes longer, the key is involvement and attention. It works better when people pay enough attention and try to think of new ideas instead of doing other things which is harder to be sure of if you don’t bring the group together effectively.
The evidence suggests that brainstorming doesn't work so well - the loudest and earliest views tend to dominate.
Instead, the recommendation seems to be to allow people to generate ideas in silence first. This is my approach, which has worked very effectively in groups of up to a dozen remotely for a variety of questions:
I like the approach described in that link, but oh man, if somebody started a meeting with "let's not brainstorm -- let's Idea Stampede", it'd be hard not to laugh.
I'm seeing weirdly negative comments about brainstorming along the lines of 'let people go off and solve the problems'.
I don't think brainstorming is about solving specific, well-defined problems.
It's about getting a diversity of view and experience to approach something. If you're not listening to a more diverse set of voices, you may be trying to solve the wrong problem from the start, and the value is along the lines of "you may have overlooked this angle/consideration/issue".
Sure, if you're at the world's greatest company, no problem comes without a very clear set of requirements and specifications that have been real-world market tested. I don't think that's a normal reality so a discussion of ways to address things is great.
Personally, my least fav is being invited to a brainstorm where blue sky is off the table and everyone is trying to say why things won't work or that they've been tried. The thing is I've been in a lot of situations where the problem was previously determined unsolvable, but where someone with different experience tried something that worked easily.
That said, I've been in brainstorming sessions that were claimed to be "blue sky" but a large subset of entrenched micro-serfs would claim everything was impossible and already attempted on their team. Brainstorming, like improv (which I'm thinking about from another comment from techdragon), relies on not being shut down. A fluid (supportive), "go on" mentality is necessary.
Certainly hits all the management-speak bingo squares. Ideation, synergy, truth seeking, circling back, curating, mon-vision, idea pool, word storming, etc.
They do briefly mention anonymity. I wish they would have spent more time there, as well as how to collect ideas not just verbally. The quiet thinkers are often left out in these sorts of exercises.
For anyone planning to organise brainstorms I really recommend reading "Applied Imagination" written by Alex Osborn.
It is a book from 1953 which introduced the idea of brainstorming. From it one can really grasp the original intention of the brainstorming technique, why it works and how it works.
Here are two things that most of the people organising brainstorming are missing and he recommends in the book:
1. Profile of the participant: should be a self-starter and should have experience with the matter/area related to the brainstorming subject.
2. Send a one-page background and invitation memo to participants describing the task to be solved with some example of the type of ideas desired.
If I remember correctly the last point should happen with enough time before the meeting so that everybody had time to read it as most theories about creativity assess the need to spend time outside the task to allow the brain to generate new idea.
(Good) comedy writing teams can do “spit-balling” successfully. I think it’s possible. I don’t think “brain-storming” is the right angle to come at the problem.
Brainstorming itself might be over-generalised or not fit for the individual in all cases. But Osborne was really focusing on methodical approaches to creativity. Which is something we don't know enough about. But my thoughts on this have been:
1) Creativity for some, means that you have to be maximally bought in on the problem or task. Ever had your mind go blank when having to come up with ideas for something you just don't care about? If I've ever had to focus on being creative on a field I just don't even marginally care about, my mind goes blank. When you care enough you'll be plenty creative. The brainstorm is a framework, which works ok in low interest, and quite well in high interest. But it's not the cause of the outcome in high interest situations. The interest is.
2) The types of people who are most creative tend to suffer most from high buy in cost. That is, they wont waste time on issues they don't care about. They wont do something unless they really enjoy it. If you ask an artist to sit down and to think of creative ways to reinvent accounting practices, she's going to tell you to piss off, or some other. Even just for one hour. But they'll put out again and again creative suggestions for things they find interesting. Unless He or She is bought in, creativity can be nullified by a lack of interest.
I would say that "individual brainstorming" (if it is a thing, as I am agnostic whether brainstorming works) is pretty much just understanding and sampling the solution space, i.e. set of all acceptable solutions. What helps in my experience is understanding various dimensions in this solution space, so you can sample across the combinations of them and see the tradeoffs.
When I was at IDEO I ran and participated in many wonderfully productive brainstorms that produced great ideas that could not have occurred otherwise. Later, at another job I tried to run a brainstorm with people who had never been in a brainstorm and it was a disaster. Like all skills, it takes practice to learn how to defer judgement and build on the ideas of others and to not be afraid to throw out a silly idea. Some of our best ideas at IDEO were silly ideas that someone else built upon to transform into a great idea. After some experience, my new group started having good brainstorms. You need some creative people who are comfortable around each other and you need to practice.
Sorry for the off topic comment but the site chat icon completely overlaps the cookie “opt out” button, such that you have no way to click on it. I have to say that’s a new dark pattern in cookie pop ups that I’ve never seen before.
Certainly hits all the management-speak bingo squares. Ideation, synergy, truth seeking, circling back, curating, mon-vision, idea pool, word storming, etc.
They do briefly mention anonymity. I wish they would have spent more time there, as well as how to collect ideas not just verbally. The quiet thinkers are often left out in these sorts of exercises. https://www.myaarpmedicare.life/
In my experience, a good brainstorming session will usually result in a few useful ideas. It's too easy to get stuck with a limited set of solutions while trying to solve design or engineering problems if you just go off on your own and think about it. Certainly there are types of problem solving which need dedicated heads-down focus, but when you're at the stage where you're trying to make major architectural decisions, it's way too easy to jump to the first thing which makes sense to you and not consider enough alternatives.
There's definitely an art to running a good brainstorm meeting. You can search for various brainstorm rules or ideas, but a few which have been helpful:
1. Sometimes it can be good with a complex topic to assign a little homework where participants bring in a few ideas, samples, props, or bits of research to the meeting. If this isn't practical, a 5-10 minute quiet study session at the beginning of the meeting can help.
2. Letting people sketch out a bunch of ideas on post-its for 5 minutes in silence and then going around the room to share the ideas can help avoid the tendency of some people to dominate the meeting, and others to never share anything. It's also helpful if your group is too large for a more free flowing sharing pattern (more than 5-8 people).
3. A warm up throw-away exercise can be useful with teams that aren't used to brainstorming or brainstorming together.
4. If anyone's ever stuck, asking the simple question of what is the opposite of something can break that brain freeze. There may not be a literal opposite, but the general concept can help people turn problems upside-down or inside-out or what ever needs to happen to free up your thinking.
5. Always try to get some people who aren't deeply embedded in the project/problem to help shake up the thinking.