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Your team might be brainstorming all wrong 🤯
When you thought your team would generate great new ideas and creative solutions during a brainstorming session but you quickly realised that the session was failing… miserably.
Limitations such as a chaotic agenda, fear of being judged, loudmouths dominating the session, participants struggling to generate thoughts, or ideas being criticised by one person can turn your brainstorming session into a flop.
How do you ensure a smooth and productive session that can get the creative juices flowing? By planning carefully.
Put together a well-stated problem and use the right framework and strategies that work for your team. Let's break it down.
Brainstorming allows people to explore new ideas by thinking outside the box. It is a handy way to encourage genuine collaboration and interaction with your team.
Inexperienced designers often fail to set expectations
The ideal brainstorming session should produce as many ideas as possible and participants are able to form their ideas freely without fear of judgment.
But sometimes, things just don't go according to plan.
Inexperienced designers often fail to set expectations and control the room. Most often, a senior outspoken stakeholder takes over the entire session. They start to give their feedback and opinions on why those ideas are bad and start selling why their ideas are good. This is a big no-no.
Setting up a few well-thought-out brainstorming rules can help a session go from a dud to achievement.
Here’s how I run brainstorming sessions step-by-step
Step 1 — Decide whether a group session or an individual session would work best for the problem. During a group brainstorming session, feel free to break the group into teams and mix up the people within those teams to alter the interpersonal dynamics.
Step 2 — Select your brainstorming method. The ones I recommend are Brainwriting & Brainwalking. But there are other methods that you can explore such as The 5 Whys, Mind Mapping, Round-Robin, SWOT Analysis, Crazy 8s, and more.
Step 3 — Gather the right team.
Step 4 — Set the agenda and be clear about time constraints.
Step 5 — Define the problem and set boundaries for the solutions.
- Research context & goals
- Onsite Agenda
- 4 Principles of Contextual Inquiry
- What to watch out for
- Contextual inquiry guide
- Roles & responsibilities
Step 6 — Do brainstorming warm-up exercises to help get your teams’ mental gears moving before ideation sessions. Use relatable topics like:
- Describe your dream home
- Name as many basketball teams as they can
- Think of as many uses for a paper clip as possible
Step 7 — Set ground rules. Be clear and don’t hesitate to remind them about these rules.
- Welcome unusual ideas
- Removing criticism from the equation
- Avoid praising and treat each idea equally
- Focus on quantity over quality
- Keep it short and simple
- Be respectful
Step 8 — Summarise the brainstorming session digitally — and only share the most critical information. This will make the information easier to digest. Tools commonly used are Figma, Mural, Google Slides, and Notion.
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Why it works
Here’s a different way to look at contextual inquiries. Imagine you’re starting a new job and it’s your first day. Everything is new. You observe how people interact, how people behave, and how things work. Imposing your will and how you did things previously won’t go down too well — especially immediately with your new colleagues.
The key takeaways that you can get from my hypothetical example reveal the advantages of using contextual inquiry in user design research.
The method gives you detailed information gathering, is user-centered, increases your chance to gather highly accurate information, and is performed in the participant’s natural environment — giving you real user insights.
Summary
My favourite brainstorming sessions are ones that promote ideas that are unexpected, look at the problem from a different perspective, or completely reframe my thinking. From this emerges productive conversations, interesting non-obvious solutions, and a clearer path to exploration.
Brainstorming can promote creative thinking, bring a team together, and help you generate incredible new ideas that can potentially solve a business problem.
Make sure that you actually do something with what the session has created. Commit to some follow-up actions as a team and see how far these ideas can take you. Don’t let it go to waste.
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