Brainstorming is a well-known technique
for encouraging creative thinking, whilst enabling a group of people to be involved
in problem solving or idea generation.
The approach was made popular by Alex Osborn, who originally called it a “Think up”
as the group would try to think up as may ideas as they could.
This was later termed a Brainstorm,
which is much catchier and in keeping with its marketing roots.
Osborn suggested that Brainstorms
should consist of up to twelve participants,
including both experts in (and people who are new to) the focus of the session.
The group is then encouraged to come up with ideas
that could be used to solve a simple, and well-defined problem.
It is recommended that the problem statement is shared with each of the participants prior to the brainstorming session,
so that they come prepared and ready to contribute.
The brainstorming technique advocated by Osborn is based on four guiding principles:
No criticism, evaluation, judgment or defense of ideas during the session.
The purpose of Brainstorming is to generate ideas.
Suspending judgment encourages the participants to come up with unusual ideas.
The evaluation and judgement phase comes in a later session.
Go for large quantities of ideas.
Participants are encouraged to contribute as many ideas as they can.
Quantity is more important here than quality,
as the more ideas that you have, the more likely it is that there will be ideas you can use.
Quantity leads to quality.
Encourage wild and exaggerated ideas
To prevent participants from self-censoring,
they are encouraged to voice any ideas that they think of
no matter how wild or wacky they may seem.
It is easier to narrow down ideas
than it is to come up with new possibilities.
Build on each other’s ideas.
Participants are encouraged to add to
or piggy-back on the ideas of others.
Combining and improving ideas as part of the creative process.
Sometimes the best ideas come
from exploring and building on the wildest and most far-fetched.
Together, these principles should help to reduce inhibitions between participants,
stimulate group creativity
and increase the number of ideas generated.
The Brainstorm is followed by a subsequent session,
which may or may not involve the original participants,
that is to evaluate the feasibility of ideas generated
and select those to be implemented.
There are a number of variations on the Brainstorming technique.
For example: Individual brainstorming involves just one person
using techniques such as Mind Mapping or Word Association
to generate and capture their ideas.
Directed brainstorming involves a group,
where each participant writes one idea on a sheet of paper.
The papers are then collected in
and randomly redistributed among the participants,
who are then asked to create a new idea that builds on or improves the idea that they have received.
This is repeated three or more times.
Structured brainstorming is another way of ensuring that everyone has an equal voice.
Group participants are given time to think about their ideas individually
and write them on Sticky Notes, capturing just one idea per note.
Once everyone has had an opportunity to write down their ideas,
the facilitator asks someone to share one of their ideas.
This is placed somewhere prominent (such as a flipchart or whiteboard)
before the group is asked if anyone came up with the same, or a similar, idea.
These are collected and placed with the original Sticky-Note.
Each participant takes turns to share an idea,
capturing and collecting contributions from others that are the same (or similar)
and grouping the Sticky Notes together.
The Brainstorm is then opened, by asking the group,
what other ideas do we or how could we improve on what we have?
Reverse brainstorming can be helpful when the group's struggling to come up with ideas.
Recognising that many people find it easier, or more fun, to be negative
the Reverse Brainstorm involves asking people to come up with ideas for the worst possible scenario.
For example, how could we deliver the worst possible customer experience?
Once the ideas have been captured, we then reverse engineer them
to find positive alternatives.
Traditional Brainstorming involves a facilitator standing at the front of a group trying to
capture everyone’s contributions on a whiteboard or flipchart.
It can work very well, and most issues with Brainstorming can be attributed
to not keeping to the four guiding principles,
or poor facilitation.
Sessions can often be dominated by particular individuals.
Thinking habits and other pressures can easily result in “group think”, reducing originality or limiting session outputs.
For example,
if the group becomes excited about a particular idea,
they're likely to spend too much time on it and get fixed on a solution too soon,
potentially at the expense of a better idea.
I've even seen sessions where group members become frustrated
as the facilitator captures what he thinks rather than what is being said.
Another, more common, issue
issue with traditional brainstorming sessions
is that the facilitator will try to encourage both quantity and wild ideas by saying
“there's no such thing as a bad idea”,
but people can leave such sessions thinking
“That was a waste of time”
as they consider most of the ideas generated to be impractical or unusable.
This feeling of the time being wasted can be magnified
when participants are not involved in the next stage of idea evaluation,
or the time between the Brainstorming session
and idea selection is too long.
There needs to be a way of quickly evaluating the ideas generated.
Although it is suggested that we shouldn’t judge ideas during a Brainstorming session,
the need to be responsive and the time constraints faced by most organisations
means that it may be a better used of time to combine the idea generation
and idea evaluation into a single session.
Adopting a Six Thinking Hats approach
to brainstorming, is a great way of generating ideas
and quickly evaluating them in a single session,
without impacting on group creativity
or willingness to participate.