Want more creativity from your team? Do brainstorming right!

 

Creativity, and the innovation that stems from it, are increasingly valuable for all organizations these days. Some folks even go so far as to say that creativity & innovation are “the engine of growth”. But how do we help our teams actually become more creative?  There is lots of advice out there, such as “encouraging a growth mindset”, building greater trust within the team, and reducing meetings to block out time for creativity. These are all helpful ideas, and I’m not disparaging any of them. But another, simpler, strategy is to go back to a technique most of us are familiar with and have used in the past (or so we think): brainstorming.

 

Brainstorming as a tool and technique goes back to the 1940’s and the work of Alex Osborne, an advertising executive. Osborne formalized the technique in his 1953 book Applied Imagination. In this work, he described the brainstorming technique and laid out the 4 rules for effective brainstorming. Now normally, when I tell people that there are “rules” for brainstorming, they are quite surprised. After all, brainstorming is supposed to be about creativity, new ideas, and even breaking down the rules, right? But following the rules helps to ensure an effective brainstorming process. 

The four rules of brainstorming were set out in Osborne’s 1953 book and are relatively simple.

1)    The more ideas, the better. This is an easy principle of brainstorming to accept. The basic idea here is that the more ideas we have to work with, the greater chance we have of finding an idea that meets all of our criteria in the end. So we sit down and get as many ideas out as possible.

2)    The crazier the idea, the better. This is also an easy principle of brainstorming for folks to accept. Indeed, this is what we often are looking for when we set down to “brainstorm”, is for someone to toss out that really crazy, off-the-wall, creative idea that will lead to the next iPhone, Tesla, 3-D printer, or similar. As more ideas come out on the table, we increase our chance of getting these truly innovative ideas. But we also need to explicitly give people permission to come up truly outlandish ideas, as opposed to censoring their ideas to fit into the constraints that we have (or believe we have). 

3)    “Piggy-backing”, or building on someone else’s idea is welcome. As we listen to someone else’s idea, we often have thoughts about how we could add a little twist to it. This may not count as a “new idea” from an intellectual property perspective, or as we think about “who to give credit to”. But from a brainstorming perspective this is encouraged because these slight variants give rise to other ideas as people continue to build on and react to what others have said.  In my experience, some teams are perfectly okay with this rule. Other teams have a harder time with it, often when team members  feel competitive pressure to come up with the “most” creative idea as individuals, or that they are being evaluated or judged based upon the creativity of the ideas that they come up with individually. If this is happening in your team, you need to do some work moving people from a sense of individual performance to team-based performance.  

4)    Deferring judgement on any idea until all the ideas are on the table. This is the rule that most groups tend to have the most difficulty with. Whether the judgement is a simple “oh, that would be too expensive”, or even a positive “hey, that’s a great idea!”. Once anyone within the team evaluates an idea, all the team members start to evaluate their ideas before they share them. This then leads to fewer ideas overall, and fewer truly innovative ideas. Numerous research studies have found that evaluation apprehension (the fear of having our ideas criticized by others) leads to a significant decrease in both the quantity and quality of ideas that come forward in a brainstorming session. 

So what does this mean for you as a leader? First, understand that as a team leader you have some responsibilities in terms of how the brainstorming session is designed. For example, how large and how diverse a group do you want in the brainstorming session? What background information do you want people to be familiar with beforehand? Are you able to bring in an outsider to help facilitate the session or will you do it yourself?

 

Second, make sure that your team members are familiar with, and truly understand, the 4 rules. An effective brainstorming session is more than simply bringing people together and hoping for spontaneous creativity. Make sure to tell them that they won’t be judged by what they say, and that any idea (even those that might seem impractical or even infeasible) are welcome. Talk to them about the role of the facilitator, and that person will be doing during the process. 

 

Finally, follow up on that by your behavior in the brainstorming session. Demonstrate the rules of brainstorming by piggy-backing off others ideas and putting truly crazy ideas out there. If you or your team is relatively new to true brainstorming, consider having a “warm-up round” first where you work on an unrelated problem, to practice the behaviors of putting ideas out there as quickly and with as little filtering as possible. 

 

Finally, remember that while brainstorming can be an excellent tool, there are plenty of variants out there as well that may be more appropriate for you to use in your situation. For example, if you have a large group and you think people will be talking over each other, or putting ideas out faster than they can be captured, you might consider the “nominal group technique”. If you want to use the brainstorming process to have team members realize the connections between their ideas and viewpoints (for example, if members believe there is conflict or tension within the team), consider using team mind mapping. If you want the brainstorming process to help your team get more comfortable with both coming up with and critiquing ideas and plans, consider the “sub-team” approach – break your team into 2 or more smaller sub-teams. Give the sub-teams time to come up with a certain number of ideas, then have each sub-team present what they think is their best idea for discussion, feedback, and improvement in the larger team session. 

 

Ultimately, the idea generation technique you use will depend on your specific goals and the problems or constraints you have to work with. But a common key across all of these techniques is forcing people to suspend judgement for a period of time to let ideas come out. The more you can do as a team leader to cultivate that sort of intellectual openness and psychological safety in your team, the more creative and innovative thinking you will start to see from your team members.