Get more out of your brainstoming sessions ...
Framing the challenge
To be really successful a brainstorm must have an appropriate challenge to work against and the right agenda to guide people towards a creative solution.
Framing the challenge is incredibly important.
Set too directive a challenge and you will quickly inhibit the team’s creativity. Set too loose a challenge and you will end up with few relevant solutions.
Always frame the challenge in an open way and ensure it is defined in consumer terms, not in such a way as it becomes self-fulfilling (e.g. a new breakfast to consume on the move, rather than a new individually wrapped cereal bar).
To maximise creativity you need to ensure you have a broadly based, cross-functional team capable of exploring all the facets of the challenge.
Structuring The Day
The right mind-set is also key. Your delegates need to be open-minded and willing to explore new and innovative ways of addressing your challenge – rather than obsessed with the status quo.
You need to ensure your agenda structure is designed as a funnel – starting broad and working towards a consensus point.
Begin by getting people to share their perspectives on the challenge; then progress to a free ranging, wide-open creative exploration session. Only once you have thoroughly explored the challenge can you start to explore ways of filtering and prioritising your starter solutions.
Allow plenty of time for starter solutions to be evolved by the teams into detailed conceptual solutions and encourage people to become concept champions.
Finally, keep your potential options open. If you try to progress to the solution too fast you are bound to miss potentially brilliant solutions.
Planning The Stimulus
Most importantly, work out a detailed timing plan. Whatever you do, do not allow timings to slip so that you fail to complete the agenda – however stimulating the debates you will leave delegates feeling unsatisfied and incomplete.
Even the most creative group of people will produce only mediocre outputs if they are working with familiar materials.
Whilst a well-framed “open” challenge on its own may help them spot fresh ways of dissecting the problem and creating a new solution, well planned and pre-sourced stimulus can be an incredibly powerful tool encouraging the team to see the problem from an undreamt of perspective.
Appropriate and inspiring creativity tools then become the icing on the cake. They simply allow the team to address the challenge by harnessing their existing shared knowledge and iencourage them to become inspired by the fresh stimulus.
With a well-planned and prepared framework, creative tools assume their proper place - the spark the ignites the touchpaper on the barrel of gunpowder!