Four ways to boost your next brainstorm session

How to inspire innovation and avoid fostering frustration

Brainstorming sessions can generate many solid ideas, but they can also end up being far from productive. How, as a business owner, can you ensure your next session delivers more than a few “just-OK” ideas? We’ve gathered top tips from experts to help you get the most out of this type of meeting.

1. Throw your anchors away

Bringing a group of people together to toss ideas around sounds simple enough, but traditional brainstorming can fall into a well-worn trap. In many cases, the first ideas expressed lead to more ideas that only relate to the first, which hinders further creative thinking. This situation is called “anchoring.”

Leigh Thompson, a management professor at the Kellogg School, knows why anchoring is so commonplace. “When [I’m] talking, you’re not thinking of your own ideas,” she wrote in an article for Fast Company. “Subconsciously, you’re already assimilating to my ideas.”

2. Try “brainwriting”

This process takes the onus away from presenting the ideas and puts it where it belongs – on the ideas themselves. Instead of having people voice their ideas, give everyone time to write them down, whether at their desks beforehand or right in the meeting room where you’re brainstorming. Next, have them share their ideas, either on unsigned Post-It notes attached to a wall or presented one at a time. Have the team members vote on which ones they’d like to explore further.

In her book, Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration, Thompson reveals that “brainwriting groups generated 20 percent more ideas and 42 percent more original ideas as compared to traditional brainstorming groups.”

3. Be a “design thinker”

Developed by IDEO – a Palo Alto, Calif., design firm that helped create Apple’s first mouse – the “Design Thinker” system focuses on customer needs as opposed to those of the company doing the brainstorming. Deloitte innovation coach Fei Yu described the process to the Financial Post, saying, “Traditional thinking might ask: ‘What can we sell to customers?’ Design thinking would ask: ‘What job does our customer need to accomplish?’ Breaking out of fixed mindsets is the first step to surfacing new ideas.”

4. Pretend you’re someone else

If you find that your team is coming up with similar ideas with increasing frequency, try a process called “figuring storming.” Ask team members to think of how another person might brainstorm a problem – and then give them someone well-known to emulate. How would Bill Gates, Alexander Graham Bell or Margaret Atwood approach the problem, for example? Although not new, this technique helps teams gain a new perspective and come up with unconventional ideas.

As with any idea-generation exercise, the goal when brainstorming is to keep an open mind and create an environment where all team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas. These approaches will help you collaborate better, shake things up and bring new ideas and workable solutions to fruition.