4 practical tips for effective brainstorming

I have a confession to make. I hate brainstorming sessions. I often find them unproductive, a bit chaotic and leaving me to wonder – what was the point?

I used to think this made me a bad innovator. Surely, brainstorming was the epitome of innovating? Lots of people in a room, coming up with lots of ideas – that’s innovation, right?

As time has gone on, and I’ve learned more about innovation, I’ve come to realise two things:

1. Brainstorming isn’t innovation, but it is an important step in the innovation process.
2. Brainstorming isn’t actually bad, it’s often just not done right!

So, here are my tips for better brainstorming, learned from my own mistakes and experience. I hope you find them helpful, and that you too can learn to love brainstorming again!

Tip 1: I wouldn’t start from here…

Getting lots of people in a room and writing down lots and lots of ideas isn’t productive, unless those people understand the problem at hand and the user needs that they are trying to generate ideas about. Too often we rush to brainstorm, when we haven’t quite defined our problem. We need to really understand the problem before we start.

Next time you’re thinking about holding a brainstorming session, take a moment to think about whether it’s the right time: do you and the team understand the issues and trends? Have you articulated the problem? Have you spoken to the users who are impacted? Sometimes it’s a matter of timing. If you can get the ground work done first, you’ll find brainstorming more productive, more relevant and more engaging.

Tip 2: Stay quiet!

I’m one of those people who will rush to fill any silence in a room – but one of the things that I’ve learned is that I need to zip it sometimes. Silence in brainstorming is really powerful. Five or ten minutes of silent thinking and idea generation at the beginning of a brainstorming session, before sharing with the group, works wonders.

It allows people who may be more naturally introverted to gather their thoughts and more actively participate, it allows for more ideas to be generated, and it avoids the group just talking about the first few ideas that are expressed and getting sucked into “group think”.

(If you want to take this further maybe try Tony McCaffrey’s “BrainSwarming” technique, which takes the silence to a new level! Or check out IDEO’s suggestions about brainstorming for introverts.)

Tip 3: Bold is beautiful

To be truly innovative we need to be bold, to put forward the big ideas, the ones which seem a bit scary or silly. Many innovations sound ridiculous or unfeasible when first pitched. The innovation process is about taking the big, bold, ridiculous ideas and refining and iterating them to make it work. Sometimes, we limit ourselves in the ideas that we put forward when brainstorming, as we filter ourselves. We are afraid of being criticised, or ridiculed, so we stay in the “safe zone”.

The challenge is how to silence our inner voice, the one that tells us to play it safe, or to stay quiet. For us at GovLab, we are convinced of the importance of having psychological safety in an innovation group. Taking a bit of time at the beginning of a brainstorming session, or at the formation of an innovation team, to focus on establishing trust is really important. Simple measures like developing a team charter of behaviours, or conducting an ice-breaker designed to build trust, can make a big difference.

Tip 4: Be ruthless!

Too often I’ve left brainstorming sessions with a wad of post-it notes, but no real idea what any of them mean, and too many ideas to feel like I can do anything useful with them. Brainstorming is itself a process: step one is creating lots and lots of ideas free from constraints, but step two is to whittle these down and start to tease them out further. By narrowing down your ideas, you can focus on developing the strongest ones. Narrowing your ideas down to just a few gives you scope to tease out a few more details about the ideas and develop them further.

Letting go of ideas is hard, so how can we do it? Set some rules and limits, apply them in a fun way, and do so in an environment of trust. For example, at GovLab we created an interactive board-game for brainstorming, which we found helps to reduce and refine ideas by making it a fun (but rule-based!) exercise. Fostering psychological safety in a group is also a key factor for this – so that people understand that it is an idea that is being rejected, not the individual who came up with it. The team can foster productive friction, and critique and challenge ideas constructively. 

Get in touch!

How do you feel about brainstorming? Do you love it or loathe it? What tips to you have for effective brainstorming and innovation?

I’d love to know your thoughts. Email me on annbyrne@deloitte.ie, or comment on my LinkedIn post to let me know!

About GovLab

GovLab is Deloitte’s public service innovation offering. We work with public service organisations across the globe to help them develop the mindset, skillset and toolkit to innovate.

What does that mean? It means we help public service organisations to build the strategy, organisation, and capabilities needed to innovate. We also get stuck-in, designing, building and launching innovations with public service organisations.

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*More on psychological safety

• Psychological safety is a term used by organisational psychologists to describe “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” It’s a team with trust, mutual respect, and where team members are comfortable being themselves. Having strong psychological safety on a team has been shown to contribute to knowledge sharing, learning, and innovation on teams (Edmondson & Lei, 2014). There’s lots of great research out there on psychological safety which can be applied not just to your innovation processes, but across all your teams. 
• For more on psychological safety check out:
  Interview with Amy Edmondson, the “inventor” of the concept of psychological safety: Harvard Business Review, (2019), “Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace” available online at https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/01/creating-psychological-safety-in-the-workplace.html [accessed 22 March 2019]
  Understanding the theory and practice of psychological safety: Edmundson, A. & Lei, Z., (2014), “Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct”, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Vol. 1:23-43, available online at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091305 [accessed 22 March 2019]
  How to create psychological safety in your teams: Delizonna, L., (2017), “High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It”, Harvard Business Review, available online at https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it [accessed 22 March 2019]
  How to assess psychological safety: Edmondson, A., (1999), “Team Learning and Psychological Safety Survey”, available online at http://www.midss.org/content/team-learning-and-psychological-safety-survey [accessed 22 March 2019]