They Force You to Brainstorm
Okay, without judging any of your ideas and building on those you have already made, jot down all the reasons why the thought of another ‘brainstorming’ session makes you want to throw up. Go!!!
What’s most nausea-inducing about brainstorming is that we expect too much from it. Brainstorming is only a starting point; nothing more, yet it gets treated as more than this. As a starting point though, it works,no doubt about it. It’s still one of the best techniques for generating ideas within teams. The trouble is, what do you do with all those ideas?
The ideas produced in a good brainstorming session will include great ideas, bad ideas, creative ideas, ridiculous ideas, stupid ideas, profound ideas, useless ideas and useful ideas. Everything comes up, which may account for that feeling of nausea. So now the task is to narrow down the list and the quickest way to do that is with brutal, and objective honesty. The reason you need brutal and objective honesty is you have to switch gears from the subjective nirvana that makes brainstorming effective to the harsh light of organizational reality.
To do this just try asking the question “What’s really going to work here from this list”? Likely a large portion of the ideas will be quickly discarded. Then you can have a really good fight over what remains and come up with a short list of the best ideas. If you’ve got people on your team that talk endlessly you can speed up the process by giving everyone three votes and they assign their votes to the ideas they think are best; often referred to as multi voting. Count up the votes and see which ideas get the most and go from there. Keep in mind you’re not really going to know which idea(s) are best until you actually start to do something with them and that’s why you don’t want to take forever to narrow down the list. Usually it’s the taking forever to narrow down the list that makes you want to throw up and never use the word brainstorm again.
As you narrow down the list you may find there are a few ideas that are on the fringes; maybe good, maybe not. This usually occurs when a team doesn’t know enough about the idea or how to implement it. Don’t lose these ideas. Hold on to them and re-examine them once in a while as things progress. They may end up being valuable.
Don’t be a brainstorm slave either. Sure it works but it can be tiresome. Brainstorming is best used when a group is stuck in its thinking or its roles. You know you’re stuck when people are bored or experiencing a gnawing sensation that something is missing. Brainstorming is also good for groups that don’t know each other very well. With a team that has been around for a while and isn’t dysfunctional to any large degree, simply asking what ideas are out there usually gets to the heart of the matter pretty quickly. If you’ve addressed the first five reasons to hate work teams you can trust that your team knows what’s going on well enough to get the important ideas out on the table, and that’s what you’re really looking for.
Discussion and comment points for this post:
What is the best idea you’ve seen come out of a true brainstorming session?
The shift from the more subjective nature of brainstorming to the more objective nature of narrowing the list can be challenging. How have you helped groups do this?
Usually, suspending the critical analysis of ideas during brainstorming is difficult. How do you do this for yourself and how have you helped groups do this?
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