Brainstorming: You’re Doing it Wrong

It might seem elementary – in fact, elementary school is probably where you first learned it – but there’s a right way and a wrong way to brainstorm. Here’s an education and psychology expert’s 3-step protocol for improving your technique.

Back in school, it used to involve colorful markers, feverish shouting, and disorganized thoughts on a dirty whiteboard. When you’re an adult, however, brainstorming is… hang on. Actually, it’s probably still a lot like that.

From Fortune 500s to tiny creative shops, brainstorming is a beloved method for generating novel ideas, but the fact of the matter is that hardly anybody does it right.

Most of the time, when we brainstorm we put forth a problem, like “productivity is down” and invite people to throw out solutions. This results in heaps of ideas – buy bananas for the office! Get better chairs! Send us all to workshops! – yet few of them end up actionable, and hardly ever in the short term.

According to R. Keith Sawyer, education and psychology professor at Washington University, there’s actually a clear formula you can use to generate creative-yet-suitable ideas. Sawyer assigns 8 steps, but you can lump them into 3 broad spheres. Here’s what you need to know to use them in the next brainstorming session you lead:

Step 1: Research solutions and offer context

Why this works: Seeing how others have tackled similar challenges arms you with ideas so you can walk into your meeting with a few solutions ready. And remember to prepare your brainstorming committee well: if your goal is to come up with ways to reduce customer support calls by 30% but your committee doesn’t know how customer support works, don’t expect them to offer good solutions. Consider having them sit in on support calls for a few hours before your brainstorming session, or at least give them relevant reading to bone up on.

Step 2: Now you can hold your brainstorming session

Why this works: Brainstorming second makes a lot of sense. With everyone’s background knowledge and research, it should be relatively easy to come up with a few good solutions, and likely many more than you would’ve unearthed without applying a little elbow grease first.

Step 3: Take the best ideas that the session produced, examine, and iterate

Why this works: If the goal of your session is a pool of ideas to review for later, then you’ll need a plan for what to do with them. Try budgeting an hour of alone time afterwards to pull out the half-dozen most promising to pursue and think them through a little further. No initial idea has ever been perfect. Whether you’re producing ideas or products, iteration is the most important part of a brainstorming session. For more on why iterating fast and light works, take a look at The Lean Startup’s MVP technique.

For more on brainstorming right and other creative processes, de-mucked, refined, and demystified, check out David Burkus’ Myths of Creativity. You can also read the 10-minute summary on Blinkist.