Golden rules
Know what you want, and what to do with it: if you are looking for a big raw list of news ideas to review later, then a plan for how you’ll review it. The simplest strategy is to plan an hour afterwards, for youself alone, to pull out the 5 or 10 most interesting ideas and examine them in detail. There is nothing worse for a team to feel their creative thinking falling into a back hole. You’ll get better ideas and more energy from people if they can see where it’s all going to go. At a minimum, say you don’t know what happens next, but give them a deadline for when they’ll get an update from you. If you fail to do so, don’t expect to be so creative at the next brainstorming session.
Know how to facilitate: someone has to run the meeting, guiding the conversation in useful directions . sometime this can be the manager or lead person, but some managers don’t have the right skills or personality for it. Good facilitation requires good listening skills, very sharp group awareness, and the ability to help people express their ideas. The facilitator should run the whiteboard, writing down ideas as people come up with them, preventing people from interrupting each other, and giving the floor to quieter people who wouldn’t ordinarily find a way to contribute on their own. Know who the best facilitator is and have them do it.
Put the focus on the list: the whiteboard or easel should be the focal point of the meeting. Make it clear to everyone in the room that you are getting together with the goal of adding as many items as possible to that whiteboard. Good ideas are nice, but you are looking for raw quantity. The person who runs the whiteboard should push the group to help each other rephrase or best describe any idea that is currently being discussed. This is another critical facilitation skill.
Comfort is key: creative thinking involves exploring non-obvious and non-traditional ideas to find unexpected good ones. To find them you have to sort through many potential embarrassing silly, goofy, or outrageous ideas. The catch is you can’t separate the good ones from the goofy ones until you’ve brought them out in the open and talked them through. The problem is that most people in the workplace are terrified of looking stupid in front of their peers or their superiors. If you have a group that isn’t comfortable being creative in front of each other, make the group smaller.
Establish the ground rules: this can help to establish comfort and make the time more useful. Will the meeting be a free for all, where anyone can suggest things at any time? Should people raise their hands? Who will write things down and document the proceedings? Is interrupting ok? Should people try interpret and expand on each other’s ideas before yelling out another one of their own? Do you can to reward team play: brainstorming should be about communicating, not competing.
Postpone criticism: this is the creativity killer. Evaluating ideas too much kills new ideas. Our minds shut down in a way if too much analysis goes on. A little bit is ok, but as soon as people start making implementation diagrams or talking about object models, it’s gone too far. Postpone evaluation till later.
1 the facilitator has to lead the session
2 the facilitator has to restart the creative process if it slow down
3. a round-shaped table is better that U shape layout for brainstorming
4. you should find a simple criteria for evaluating the big list of ideas.