5 tips for more productive brainstorming sessions
It’s a well-known fact that two heads are better than one. But just because you have quantity, doesn’t mean you have quality. After all, there are good ideas and there are bad ideas, so what can you do to make sure you and your staff come up with good ones?
Here are five tips for more effective brainstorming sessions.
- Focus on success
Famous saying of “if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail” is true and can be applied to almost every single aspect of our life, but is especially true to the process of brainstorming. What is the objective of your brainstorming session? Is it marketing ideas, improvement of internal processes, promotion of the brand? Make it absolutely clear what your objectives are and how you are intending and what guidelines you are willing to lay down in order to achieve them. This will allow all participants to approach the issue from their own unique perspective and provide the best input possible.
- Organise the facilities
It might sound very basic, but you would be surprised how bad some people are at organising meetings. Do you require Internet? Is it a presentation or a simple discussion? How many people will be present? How long is the meeting going to run? All these factors will require certain conditions, like technology, refreshments, room size, etc. Make sure to take care of all these factors when organising a brainstorming session in order to avoid frustration and disruptions on the most rudimentary level.
- Make it challenging
It is important to keep your team on the top of their game, and one of the better ways of achieving them is to present them with non-conventional challenges and “roadblocks”. Set a very specific set of parameters for the issue which you are trying to solve (e.g. marketing campaign needs to reach 10,000 people within a week with only €100 budget, etc.). Boundaries are one thing that inspires thinking outside of the box. Try to practice it with your employees more often and you will see the results soon.
- Watch out for groupthink
First defined by psychologist Irving Janis, it refers to instances when groups of people skip the critical thinking process and arrive at the same conclusion. Groupthink is the biggest killer of brainstorming sessions and should be avoided at all costs.
Try to approach brainstorming by dividing the group as much as possible with introducing some other topics into the mix, on which people might have different opinions. Politics, recent news developments, sports, and then go back to the original discussion of the issue.
- Act on it
Perhaps, the most important step in the brainstorming process is what happens after it is concluded. Your time is precious and you can’t afford to let it go to waste unless you follow up with a clear action plan once the brainstorming session is concluded. Set out a clear plan with deadlines, objectives and responsibilities. Assign tasks to members of your teams and lay down the schedule for each one. It is crucial everyone knows what they are doing.
Brainstorming might sound simple and fun, but there is much more to it. Oftentimes they make a difference between enabling a company to grow or fail.