Please stop brainstorming
Also, how to get unstuck when you’re not sure what to do next
Brainstorming meetings drive me nuts.
Brainstorming threads in Slack drive me nuts.
Brainstorming breakout sessions at conferences drive me nuts.
Brainstorming doesn’t drive me nuts in theory, but the way it happens in practice is in fact like putting a steering wheel on a cashew (because it...drives...me…nuts...).
Even if you don’t care for brainstorms, I find that most people still think of them as worthwhile.
Well, I think they’re not. For two reasons:
People in the brainstorming meeting almost never have enough context going in. The ingredient to a good idea is a good understanding of the situation, and most brainstorming meetings don’t arm their participants with that understanding going in.
Live brainstorms are literally worse than coming up with ideas on your own. Research shows that the number and creativity of ideas go down when brainstorming as a group vs. as an individual.
Here are the first two sentences of the abstract of a meta-analysis of 800 studies on brainstorming.
“This article reports the results of a meta-analytic integration of previous research on productivity loss in brainstorming groups. The following patterns were observed: Generally, brainstorming groups are significantly less productive than nominal groups, in terms of both quantity and quality.”
If you think about this, it makes sense. You ever have an idea on the tip of your tongue and not share it? Most people in the room feel that way during a brainstorm session. There’s social pressure to not share ideas unless they are “good,” which in practice means that there are fewer shared ideas.
Those are the core problems, but not the only problems:
Sessions never seem to include an effective way to capture next steps based on the ideas shared, so not much gets implemented
Most of the time gets spent discussing a relatively small number of ideas
A session, which is almost always unmoderated, is highly vulnerable to being hijacked by one person with a strong voice. Sometimes that means soapboxing, sometimes just talking a lot.
So yeah, not a fan.
I think when people want to brainstorm, it’s usually because they don’t have enough information about the work they want to do. They feel blocked and unsure what to do next.
I think Anne Lamott’s thoughts on writer’s block apply here too. “The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty.”
When the path forward is unclear, it’s often due to missing information. Contrary to how I’m probably coming off, I’m a big fan of creativity and solo brainstorming. Airily sitting with a pen and paper is one of my favorite ways to think through problems — after I’ve done the work to absorb all the information I can about a situation.
In one of my fave books on strategy, Richard Rumelt breaks the fundamental work of strategizing into three components: diagnosing the situation, determining a guiding principle based on the diagnosis, and executing specific actions based on the guiding principle.
Of these steps, he argues that diagnosing the situation is most important.
“The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”
Uncovering leverage points in a situation is how you know which levers to pull.
When you’re stuck, the answer isn’t to brainstorm with people who probably have even less context about your situation. It’s to go get more of the information you need — whether that’s customer research or finance info or lifecycle data or market analysis or anything else.
Brainstorming is a tool. I think that tool is usually applied poorly, like using a vacuum cleaner to suck standing water from a clogged bathtub. It will sort of work, but it will also sort of fuck up your vacuum, so you should probably start by plunging, snaking the drain, or calling a plumber.
If you are going to brainstorm, do it like this.
Here’s how no one ever brainstorms, for some crazy reason (because it works)
If you want to have a productive brainstorming session, do it like this:
Everyone goes off and writes down their ideas. Emphasize that all ideas should be captured, no matter how silly, not thought out, or impractical they are.
In the meeting, have everyone put their ideas up on a shared whiteboard, or into the same Google Doc
A moderator (you!) runs the session. Start by looking for common ideas across the group and discuss.
Or you can run it like this:
Everyone goes off and writes down their ideas. Emphasize that all ideas should be captured, no matter how silly, not thought out, or impractical they are.
In the meeting, break off into groups of 2 or 3 to discuss the ideas you’ve written down.
A moderator (you!) brings the whole meeting back together, and each group shares what they came up with
Or you can use the 6-3-5 technique, another research-backed brainstorming method.
The most important element is that people come to the meeting with their ideas already brainstormed. Ideas that people brainstorm on their own tend to be more creative (and there are more of them).
After that, you need a way to push similar ideas together — you can do that either by putting all of the ideas on display (advantage of capturing everything and letting people see trends) or by breaking people into small groups (speeds up the pace of discussion, lets you go deeper on the individual ideas).
The moderator is there to keep discussion flowing and avoid fixation on an idea.
This works better when everyone already knows each other. I once ran a brainstorming session in a group that already had pretty good rapport. In that session, we:
Wrote our separate ideas
Ranked our ideas by how good we thought they were
Paired off into groups of 2
Shared our worst idea with our partners
“Yes and” -ed our bad ideas until they were good ideas
Chicago is an improv comedy town, so I borrowed an idea from improv — no bad ideas, we just have to make the ideas successful.
This session started from ideas like “we should run a happy hour with no alcohol” or “we should film the team doing their best celebrity impressions” and ended at ideas like “what if we sent a swag kit to sponsor people who run small business meetups in their cities” and “we should film customer support reps reacting to the positive feedback they get from customers.”
If you’re going to brainstorm, establishing a “yes and” rule can lead you to much more creative ideas.
In the above example, I asked people to share their “worst” idea for two reasons.
First, it took pressure off. No one was afraid of sharing a bad idea because the ideas were supposed to be bad. Later in the session we shared ideas from farther up the list, and the discussion was much more lively. One of the biggest problems with brainstorming sessions is that people don’t share their more creative ideas for fear of judgment, and this was a way around that.
Second, I wanted to make the point that ideas are just ideas. Bad ideas can quickly become good ideas if you go in with a mentality of “we are going to find a way to turn this into a good idea.” I wanted the team to feel comfortable raising and thinking through ideas after the session too, and this helped.
So stop brainstorming. Or at least stop brainstorming the way most people do.
If you’re going to brainstorm, make it productive.
For more about brainstorming: