| I have to say that I'm somewhat surprised by the negative comments on brainstorming here. Perhaps people have only been in crappy meetings which are superficially called brainstorms but are really excuses for a manager to ram their ideas through? In my experience, a good brainstorming session will usually result in a few useful ideas. It's too easy to get stuck with a limited set of solutions while trying to solve design or engineering problems if you just go off on your own and think about it. Certainly there are types of problem solving which need dedicated heads-down focus, but when you're at the stage where you're trying to make major architectural decisions, it's way too easy to jump to the first thing which makes sense to you and not consider enough alternatives. There's definitely an art to running a good brainstorm meeting. You can search for various brainstorm rules or ideas, but a few which have been helpful: 1. Sometimes it can be good with a complex topic to assign a little homework where participants bring in a few ideas, samples, props, or bits of research to the meeting. If this isn't practical, a 5-10 minute quiet study session at the beginning of the meeting can help. 2. Letting people sketch out a bunch of ideas on post-its for 5 minutes in silence and then going around the room to share the ideas can help avoid the tendency of some people to dominate the meeting, and others to never share anything. It's also helpful if your group is too large for a more free flowing sharing pattern (more than 5-8 people). 3. A warm up throw-away exercise can be useful with teams that aren't used to brainstorming or brainstorming together. 4. If anyone's ever stuck, asking the simple question of what is the opposite of something can break that brain freeze. There may not be a literal opposite, but the general concept can help people turn problems upside-down or inside-out or what ever needs to happen to free up your thinking. 5. Always try to get some people who aren't deeply embedded in the project/problem to help shake up the thinking. |
It’s important to prevent people thinking their ideas are foolish. Running a good brainstorming session is a skill just like running a good scrum, it’s not just another generic meeting and a lot of people try to think you can “just brainstorm”.
Experience has taught me that first improvisation skills help, because at least when I’m the first idea gathering phase you really need to both “yes, and” all the ideas being presented you also have to try and avoid “shutting down the scene” in that you want a good flow of ideas and until you start trying to select the useful apps you don’t want anyone’s behaviour to steer other people from sharing ideas they may have.
Second, if you’re the only one with any improv skills you’re also the one best equipped to “play the fool” and relentlessly suggest outrageous things and make sure they are placed on the board, to make sure everyone else is more likely to think “my ideas are better than that” and then you can encourage others to share those better ideas.
Also a brainstorming session doesn’t need to be an extrovert party. You can run one semi-asynchronous via slack it just takes longer, the key is involvement and attention. It works better when people pay enough attention and try to think of new ideas instead of doing other things which is harder to be sure of if you don’t bring the group together effectively.