Beyond Brainstorming: 5 Essential Tips for Smarter Group Ideation

Too often when it comes to brainstorming and collaboration, we tend to prefer whimsical, unstructured activities. Agreed upon best practices are few and far between.

Will too much structure restrict the free flow of thought? Who should be invited to participate? Is the more the merrier? How are we supposed to adapt when we can’t all be in one room together?

Based on a deep and long-standing interest in structured ideation, workshop facilitation, and how a service design mindset might be applied to improve workshop experiences, this article weighs in on these oft-asked questions. Here are five simple tips for improving the success of your ideation sessions.

1. Run structured ideation sessions, not free form brainstorms.
2. Be specific about the type of ideation effort required and who is best suited to participate.
3. Run multiple small, short sessions instead of a single big, long one.
4. Create and collect a rich pool of ideation inputs before every session.
5. Use a mix of solo and group activities — ideally solo first, then groups.

In more detail…

1: Run structured ideation sessions, not free form brainstorms.

Brainstorming is characterized by quantity over quality, wacky ideas, and informal, unstructured group thinking; however, output is often inconsistent. It’s unclear if great brainstormers are born or can be made, and as a process, brainstorming lacks mechanisms to keep unconscious bias from seeping into participants’ ideas. In contrast, insights-driven, structured ideation injects discipline into the process, in order to more reliably and repeatedly make everyone's time and effort worth it.

Often people worry that structure will restrict participants’ ability to think freely. Structure need not be enforced with an iron fist; rather, if someone has ideas ready to go, you can always encourage them to grab a blank sheet and express themselves. Providing structure, fodder, and inputs merely gives participants options for getting started if they need a nudge.

2: Be specific about the type of ideation effort required and who is best suited to participate.

There are lots of different ideation activities, for example: crowdsourcing for ideation inputs, idea generation, idea refinement, and idea evaluation. By being more specific about what a single session focuses on (i.e. instead of trying to do everything all at once), you can also be more intentional about pairing ideation activities with different types of participants.

Some questions you might ask yourself include:

• Could I invite participation more indiscriminately when crowdsourcing for ideation inputs?
• Is it better to engage those closest to the topic – regardless of their seniority – for initial idea generation and ask senior leadership to help with idea refinement and evaluation?
• Do I need less time for idea refinement sessions than for idea generation sessions?
• Is it possible for idea refinement and idea evaluation to happen mostly asynchronously? E.g. Do an async round of blind voting before meeting to discuss the results?

3: Run multiple small, short sessions instead of a single big, long one.

Smaller sessions (e.g. six participants instead of 20) yield more hands-on engagement from participants and also maximizes the “air time” each participant gets during their session. Research shows that as the number of people in a session increases, the productivity of ideas per person decreases due to social demands like waiting their turn to talk or due to free rider issues (i.e. not feeling as personally accountable to do the work because there are others who can).

Planning to have a series of coordinated sessions (e.g. four over two weeks) makes it easier to design a hyper-focused session that can be done in less time (e.g. 90 minutes instead of four or more hours). It’s also easier to fit into participants’ schedules when there is more than one date to pick from and the request is for a shorter amount of time.

Additionally, you can build on learnings and ideas from previous sessions. For example, you could focus on something slightly different in each session (and by doing so increase what you are able to cover overall), or you could refine how specific activities are facilitated based on seeing what works well and what needs improvement.

Perhaps the biggest reason of all to have multiple ideation sessions, though, is the fact that it enables you to engage a more diverse set of participants. The more variety you have represented across discipline, seniority, gender identity, race, age, ability levels, etc., the more confident you can be that you've thought about things from multiple angles and the better you can eliminate unconscious bias that might lead you to overlook opportunities.

4: Create and collect a rich pool of ideation inputs before every session.

Ideation inputs are the foundation for successful ideation sessions. There are three main buckets of content that should be collected as inputs for any ideation session: insights, inspiration, and guardrails. A breadth of insights and inspiration from varied sources is best because it gives your participants all the more fodder to work with.

5: Use a mix of solo and group activities — ideally solo first, then groups.

Before coming together as a group to discuss and build on each others’ ideas, it’s important to allow time for participants to work on their own. Solo time lets people think freely and keeps the negative influences of groupthink at bay. Giving people that time means that everyone will have something to share with the group, which solves for any free rider issues and creates more comfortable opportunities for less extroverted folks to contribute. Solo time can be before the session or within a session you can simply allocate time for solo work before group activities or shareouts.

Especially as we continue to work from home, leveraging collaborative doc platforms like Google Docs or Quip in your remote workshops is a great way to let people articulate their thoughts for themselves. Sharing out and building on others’ ideas via comments is an organic, low-stress way to transition from solo to group work.

In summary

To get more value out of your ideation sessions, you need more than a one-size-fits-all approach. By taking the steps outlined in this article, you can:

• Be more precise about the focus of each session, and accordingly, how long the session needs to be.
• Be more precise about why each participant is necessary for each session.
• Integrate novelty and variety, in order to increase the odds that your sessions will generate a large number of relevant ideas.

Additional reading

• Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Breakthrough Innovations
• Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration
• The Art of Gathering
• Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making