Last week an RWA staffer was chatting with a colleague who was commiserating about a shipping problem at her company. ‘How big of an issue can a bit of mail be?’ vaguely crossed our staffer’s mind. Well, apparently this was a doozy, involving three separate departments that were now at odds within her company. The issue wasn’t black and white and so the staffer, thinking creatively, suggested she hold a brainstorming session with each of the departments concerned.
“This involves shipping perishables cross country,” she said, “not generating creative advertising concepts.” Our staffer went back to sipping mojitos and let the matter drop, pondering the question of why this particular friend was… well… so darn pigheaded.
While brainstorming isn’t new, a lot of managers think the concept is reserved solely for creatively inclined businesses. It’s not. Brainstorming can yield creative solutions, certainly, but the type of issue about which the ideas are generated is practically irrelevant. The key is in the process. Successful brainstorming needs to have some structure, however, or your participants might get lost in a downpour of new ideas and lose focus of what the original brainstorming was about.
Here are a few tips on successful brainstorming:
1. Put someone in charge. Brainstorming involves a facilitator to conduct the meeting and keep the group on task—although an effective facilitator knows when to let the group run in order to encourage the free exchange of ideas and maintain a relaxed, freeform atmosphere.
2. Remember the golden rule: there are no bad ideas. Humor, off-the-wall concepts, impossibilities, even wishful thinking—to a point, of course—are all in bounds during a successful brainstorming session. Because while one member of the team suggests adding eight more hours to the 24-hour day, another is taking that impossible cue and molding it into a more realistic idea that might never have come about if not for the clowning of the original team member.
3. Make sure the brainstorming group is varied. Ten board directors brainstorming about a shipping issue wouldn’t be nearly as effective as a mix of employees from shipping clerk to company president because each will have a unique set of concerns that the other might not have even considered. The size of the group also may vary, but generally more is better than less—again, up to a point.
4. Time your meeting for maximum creative brainflow. Brainstorming at 9:00 a.m. on a Monday when folks are still shaking the cotton candy out of their heads or at 4:00 p.m. on a Friday when they’re chomping at the bit to get to happy hour is not recommended. Also, letting the participants know what the session will be about a day or two prior to the meeting is a good tactic. The phrase “sleep on it” is a very real concept as the subconscious is constantly working even when we’re not deliberately thinking about something.
5. State what the issue is at the outset of the meeting. Explanation should be as detailed as possible, but not lead to any particular solution that may already be under consideration. The group may have questions to further clarify the issue, answers to which may not be known and so become part of the process.
Lastly, if you Google “Brainstorming,” there are lots of guides and rules for the most effective way to run a session, and some of them might be quite useful in your particular situation. At RWA, we tend to fly by the seat of our pants. But, hey, we’re creative people and we do rein it back in if the subject turns to space aliens or if staffers’ attention shifts from the meeting to their smart phones. That’s when we bring out the rubber chickens. We’ll blog about that later.
Happy brainstorming!
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