The Recipe To A Perfect Brainstorming Session
Brainstorming 101
Why Brainstorm Better?
Organizations are always going out of date. Markets shift, teams change, and technology advances, constantly introducing new challenges and forcing organizations to rethink how they’ve always done business.
An organization that fails to engage in regular brainstorming and innovation will find themselves losing customers, decreasing profits, and over time, be out of business. This slide to obscurity is often invisible until it’s too late, so it’s better to build innovation habits to stay ahead.
“Innovate or die.”
Innovation begins in the brainstorming room. This recipe is sure to generate the raw materials you need to stay innovative, creative, and growing. Let’s get cooking!
Overview of the Recipe
This dish is perfect for organizations that want to be innovative, creative, and pragmatic! We recommend making this Perfect Brainstorming Session every quarter to address changing market conditions, to keep your team engaged and motivated, and to capitalize on your organization’s growth.
The secret ingredient in this recipe is to introduce data at just the right time. Too early and you risk deflating the innovation process, keeping ideas too realistic and backwards facing. Too late and you risk chasing fun-but-irrelevant ideas that ultimately won’t grow your business.
Let us know how your Perfect Brainstorming Session turns out by leaving a comment at the end of the recipe!
A Perfect Brainstorming Session Ingredient List
Note: Many of these ingredients can be generated in advance given the right prompts and preparation, but for teams short on time, you can create them right on the spot.
3-5 different perspectives
Impossible ideas
Risky ideas
Dumb ideas
1 desired future state
Instructions
1. Add 3-5 Perspectives
Before anything else, a variety of perspectives is essential to a productive brainstorming session. Everyone has unique experiences and beliefs but the greater the variety, the more likely an innovative or creative idea will be generated.
A brainstorming session is a process: one idea inspires someone else, who in turn inspires someone else, and so on. Drawing new connections requires a breadth of experiences that typically don’t get to interact. You would be shocked by what a Chief Sales Officer, a Customer Success Manager, and a Receptionist could achieve!
2. Clean Your Work Surface of Distrust
Psychological safety rests on a foundation of trust. For a brainstorming session, participants need to trust that:
Any and all ideas are fair game in the brainstorming room
At the end of the process, action will actually be taken
There are meaningful stakes: there’s an urgency and need that this brainstorming is ultimately going to address
Nobody will be shamed, sidelined, or ridiculed during the process
It’s helpful to make these points explicit at the start of a brainstorming session, either by reading the above bullets out loud or generating a mandate for the brainstorming session.
3. Make Culture of Quiet Impossible
A brainstorming session goes nowhere if nobody speaks. It can take courage to propose the first idea, as well as the first creative idea. For organizations that don’t regularly innovate or ideate, there can be a Culture of Quiet that inhibits creativity. Habits are learned through constant practice: keeping quiet can be a bad habit learned through countless unproductive meetings!
A Perfect Brainstorming Session eliminates the need for courage by running activities that require creative participation. If everyone is expected to participate in a non-threatening way, you jump start the creative process. Here are five activities that can make contributing ideas easy and fun!
4. Mix
Through activities, discussion, and debate, a Perfect Brainstorming Session should generate three types of ideas:
Impossible Ideas: Suggestions that are so detached from the present day reality that they seem utterly impossible
Risky Ideas: A suggestion that depends on so many factors that it would be considered “risky,” either in terms of an organization’s ability to execute or that the impact would directly benefit the organization
Dumb Ideas: Something so simple, counterintuitive, or banal that outside the boundaries of the brainstorming session it may be considered dumb
At this stage of the brainstorming session, impossible, risky, and dumb ideas should be elevated. Innovation needs to be unshackled from realistic, safe, and formal mindsets. All the work you put in to include multiple perspectives, lay a foundation of trust, and foster an expectation to participate has set the stage for something truly unexpected, creative, and inspired: let it soar!
It’s also possible to bring in data points that help expand the pool or intensity of these impossible, risky, and dumb ideas, but be careful that real world data doesn’t inhibit creativity. For example, market data such as a Total Addressable Market (TAM) Analysis can help focus wild ideas into a particular industry segment. However, an organization’s prior sales numbers will anchor creativity to the organization’s previous performance.
5. Shape And Place Into A Baking Dish of Your Desired Future State
We recommend crafting the Desired Future State midway through the Perfect Brainstorming Process because it takes a bit of time for teams to warm up their creativity. The risk of crafting a Desired Future State early on is that the goalposts will be placed only a bit further along the current organizational course of action, rather than ask whether a new direction would serve the organization better.
Bringing in many perspectives early on also helps influence exactly what problem or outcome the brainstorming session is due to achieve. Including your dreamers and achievers early on can strongly influence where the goalposts for your brainstorming session will be erected.
Now that you have a pile of truly creative ideas, it’s time to gently rein them back into the real world. The first step is that a Desired Future State needs to be defined. This future state should be aligned with the organization’s mission, purpose, and strategic goals. Here are some possible future states:
An employer brand that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion
A new product that addresses an emerging problem for our existing customer base
Guardrails designed to promote internal work/life balance
With this Desired Future State, hold up your most exciting ideas and ask, “Can this get us there? Can a part of this get us there? Is it likely that this idea will actually work?” Prioritize, remix, and narrow down to 2-3 possible ideas.
6. Bake in the Iron Triangle
The Iron Triangle, also known as the “triple constraint,” is a project management model that address three linked factors:
Scope- how big is the project?
Cost- how expensive is the project?
Time- how much time can we give to the project?
Or more simply,
““Good, Fast, Cheap.
Choose two.””
With your 2-3 possible ideas, sketch out how big, expensive, and time-intensive the project would be to deliver the Desired Future State without compromising the outcome. By applying these pragmatic questions while holding the Desired Future State holy, you introduce a new level of creativity in terms of execution. Repurposing budgets, considering new hires, and challenging how your organization has worked in the past all help a brainstorming session approach old problems in new ways.
It’s likely, though, that there will need to be tradeoffs in order for your organization to realistically innovate. The debate around those tradeoffs can be tough, but they’re absolutely critical to a Perfect Brainstorming Session to generate something both innovative and practical. You may even have to compromise the Desired Future State by slicing it into phases or addressing a smaller scope, but be careful of mortgaging a dream because nobody wants to challenge the status quo.
At the end of this step, you should have a single innovative and practical idea…but it’s not ready to be served until it’s been checked for doneness.
7. Check for Doneness With Data
This step is where many brainstorming sessions fall short: the evidence. A solid idea means little unless there’s proof that backs it up.
Your idea needs to be vetted with data, ideally from a wide range of sources that are both objective and subjective. This evidence is designed to confirm two assumptions:
The problem that you’re trying to solve is a real and important problem worth solving
The solution that you’re proposing is a realistic and well-matched solution to that problem
Data sources that can help you confirm these two assumptions can include market research, customer interviews, employee surveys, cost projections, government research, and focus groups.
Beware: Confirmation Bias is a real risk! It is extremely tempting for a brainstorming team to find the data that supports their idea, rather than objectively collecting and weighing evidence. It’s strongly encouraged that unbiased people outside of the brainstorming process research and vet the proposal. If you don’t have that internal resource, consider hiring a third-party consultant to collect, analyze, and validate the data against your proposal.
Serving Suggestions
If you faithfully followed the recipe, you should have done the following:
Included a wide range of perspectives
Cultivated a space where those perspective can shine
Generated many impossible, risky, and dumb ideas
Refined those ideas into something possible, plausible, and powerful
Assessed the practicality of actually pursuing an innovative idea
Validated the idea using external evidence
Now what? We suggest two courses of action.
Sell The Story
Throughout time, great ideas have been dismissed. A Perfect Brainstorming Session can be an exercise in futility if the idea dies on the vine. The art of merchandising, selling, and getting buy-in on an idea is a whole other guide, but it needs to be given the same care and attention that you invested in the brainstorming process.
Send It Back To The Kitchen
Be willing to admit that you could be wrong about any assumptions you made throughout the brainstorming process. A Perfect Brainstorming Session is designed to invite innovation into your organization, but you may misjudge the right amount of innovation for your organization. Building in feedback loops and planning for multiple kinds of objections can improve your likelihood of nailing that perfect serving size of innovation.
Start Brainstorming Today!
Anyone can arrange a Perfect Brainstorming Session! Try it out with a small team or project and assess for yourself how innovative you can be. If you identify a scenario or suggestion that improves the Perfect Brainstorming Session’s taste, let us know in the comments.
