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Brainstorming Meeting Techniques
Quick Summary
Guidelines for facilitating a brainstorming session, covering several types of brainstorming, detailed guidelines for starting off effectively, and pitfalls to watch out for.
What this is
A set of how-to guidelines for facilitating a Brainstorming Session.
A brainstorming session is a tool to generate ideas from a selected audience to solve a problem or stimulate creativity. These meetings are used for solving a process problem, inventing new products or product innovation, solving inter-group communication problems, improving customer service, budgeting exercises, project scheduling, etc.
Using these tools can help discussion facilitators and Project Managers with alternative approaches for creative idea generation meetings (aka Brainstorming Sessions). They are particularly useful when previous meetings have gone afoul, are not as effective as they could be or productivity during these exercises is less than it should be.
Why it's useful
Not all Brainstorming sessions are effective. Many times these types of meetings suffer due to various factors, such as:
- unclear objectives or ill-defined goals
- disorganized or less-than-enthusiastic participation
- failures in note taking
- conflicts among team members
- strong or overbearing personalities
- "class system" in a pecking-order hierarchy
- micro-management by various decision makers
- "not invented here" (NIH) syndrome
Having a defined and communicated plan or objective, having agreed-upon and enforced "meeting guidelines," and knowing what kind of brainstorming techniques to use will make your creativity and decision making meetings more effective.
How to use it
- Follow your normal meeting processes and conventions with 1) a designated meeting time and duration, 2) a designated meeting place and 3) early notification to the participants with enough time for everyone to put the meeting on their schedule and get prepared.
- A Generic Meeting Guidelines checklist is provided in this file. Modify this as appropriate with your own words by adding items that are important to your team and project culture. Delete or modify items that do not apply or are not appropriate. These are "rules" that should be agreed upon by the participants and self-enforced or peer-enforced during the meeting.
- Review the set of Brainstorming Session Guidelines for desired actions and behaviors during a brainstorming session. Include the appropriate ones in your Meeting Guidelines for the Brainstorming Session.
- Review the list of items that should be vehemently guarded against, and be on the lookout for any of these in your brainstorming meetings.
- Distribute the Meeting Guidelines when the participants are invited and briefly review these at the beginning of the Brainstorming Session.
- Consider the type of audience or team you are collecting for the brainstorm. Consider the type of problem or question you are going to try to solve. Select a type of Brainstorm Technique that will work for the particular audience and the particular problem. You may select a couple of techniques for the meeting and combine them, or have a primary and a backup, if the primary technique is not getting the desired results.
- Review the 'Things that get in the way of Creativity' list. Add your own items.
- When a team is comfortable with doing brainstorming together, sometimes it's just fun for a change of pace to use one of the alternate techniques.
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