Better Brainstorming

Domain: Personal Effectiveness - Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

One of the most effective ways of developing innovative and effective ideas is by leveraging both cognitive diversity and collaboration.

Most are familiar with collaboration but for those of you not familiar with cognitive diversity, it is the variety of different perspectives, backgrounds, information processing styles and education levels within a particular group. The more cognitive diversity you have within a group, the more likely they are to develop innovative and well-rounded approaches to their work.

Today, we're going to highlight how to leverage this diversity of thought to deliver more effective brainstorming. Here are just a few ways to do that…

Assign the task in advance

The biggest mistake teams make with brainstorming is springing the exercise on everyone in the same meeting that the brainstorming is to occur. As fun as collaboration is, people are generally more effective at idea generation when they have time to themselves to focus.

Provide your team with advance notice (at least a few days) that you'll be holding a brainstorming exercise for whatever problem or topic you are trying to solution.

Everyone processes information and generates ideas in a different manner and so we'll start by providing each individual the time and space to do just that.

Aim for quantity

Encourage individuals to aim for the quantity of ideas over the quality of ideas. Brainstorming is about getting as many ideas out as possible. We don't want people doubting or self-editing ideas that may turn out to be truly valuable. Encourage your team to put aside doubts or assumptions and to simply focus on writing-out as many ideas as they can.

Compile ideas

Still in advance of the meeting, have the ideas sent to the facilitator in order to be combined into one list. The facilitator will start the meeting by reading-off the ideas which should also be available for all to see (either physically or digitally).

During this reading, there is no discussion, questions or clarification on the ideas. Only a read-out. This helps to lessen the impacts of any personal biases or office politics. It focuses on the idea over the person delivering it.

Discuss and build

The next phase is to start brainstorming as a group now that we've heard ideas from each individual. The focus of this phase is to collaborate as a group and build upon what has already been shared. It may be a combination of ideas, a variation of an idea or a new idea sparked by what everyone else contributed.

This two phased approach takes advantage of both cognitive diversity and team collaboration in order to arrive at the strongest solution possible.

Thank you for reading. My hope is always that you've found something helpful and easy to implement.