If your company or team doesn’t look at brainstorming as a team sport, you’re probably doing it wrong. And it drives me crazy how rarely I see true, collaborative brainstorming sessions.
When I worked at Google, I’d regularly attend planning meetings where the client would present some sort of creative brief to their digital ad agency, their TV buyers, their PR firm, and to us Googlers. They’d present and we’d all ask some basic questions. Then we’d scurry out of the meeting to tackle our individual challenge.
We’d get back to our cushy Google office, maybe gather around a white board, and start throwing ideas at the wall like partially cooked pasta (you know that thing where pasta is supposed to stick to the wall when it’s cooked?) to see what stuck.
After a day, week, or month we’d reconvene and present our brilliant, well constructed, fully-baked ideas. Client says yes or no. Maybe we make some money. All good.
But you know what I’m wondering when I’m sitting there listening to all these fully-baked ideas from all these various vendors with diverse backgrounds and unique areas of expertise? I’m wondering what the half-baked ideas looked like. I’m wondering what random rejected ideas never reached the stage of being fully-formed. I’m wondering about the pasta that didn’t stick to the wall.
Why do the “bad” ideas matter? Well let me answer my question with another question. Have you ever played Mad Gab?
Mad Gab is a game where the playing card has a seemingly random series of words that when you sound out in a certain way, it actually sounds like a known word or phrase. We used to play it at family reunions when we were kids, and I highly recommend it. The game generally consists of your team shouting (progressively louder) a bunch of nonsensical syllables, with different points of emphasis, hoping to stumble across the actual phrase.
I was always pretty good at Mad Gab. Sometimes I could just look at the card and the phrase would pop into my head. Other times, the answer I was searching for would only reveal itself if I listened carefully to the crazy nonsense my teammates were yelling. It was their wrong answers, their “bad” ideas, their not yet fully formed phrases that got me the right answer.
The same works for brainstorming new ideas with your colleagues. You’d be amazed how often one silly little comment might lead to someone else’s brilliant breakthrough. And I know it’s not always easy. I’ve worked with plenty of teammates over the years who would feel “uncomfortable” being asked to brainstorm out loud, with others. It can be intimidating. It can be unnerving. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
The best brainstorming sessions I’ve seen, including the innovation workshops that I facilitate, all involve lots of voices sharing lots of ideas. We usually start our brainstorming sessions with four very simple rules:
Some ideas might be impossible, impractical, or just not a good fit. That’s ok. In brainstorming sessions, bad ideas are better than no ideas.
When doing collaborative brainstorming, everyone in the room should act and feel like equals. Don’t worry about job titles or years of experience. It’s just a bunch of brains in a room.
Prioritize quantity of ideas over quality of ideas. You can polish and refine them later.
Speak up. The worst thing you can do in brainstorming is to walk out of the room with an idea still in your head.
To a lot of people and a lot of companies, “brainstorming” feels like a very general and ambiguous concept. It feels like something that happens in the background. Concepts like “the shower principle” make us feel like brainstorming works best when it’s unscheduled and informal. But brainstorming is too important of a tool to take for granted. It’s too valuable to not give it the time and space and effort that it deserves. And the challenges you’re solving and the ideas you’re searching for are too big and too impactful to think you can solve them on your own.
Or as Mad Gab might put it: All Weighs Brines Torn Two Gather