Write drunk, edit sober: brainstorming techniques

Some I like

Mar 17, 2023

This is the third post in a series. Each stands alone, though they do relate. The first, Facilitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery argues that in the Ideas Era where knowledge and skills are distributed horizontally, everyone should acquire facilitation skills and techniques, especially managers. A reader’s comment emphasized the value of incorporating them into an organization’s culture. I agree. I believe there is value in weaving facilitation techniques, including brainstorming, into the fabric of your organization and your daily life for that matter.

The second post, Is Brainstorming its Own Bad Idea?, defends brainstorming against evidence that it doesn’t work, arguing two things:

not meeting the extravagant claims made for it, doesn’t mean it isn’t useful,
many of the objections to it can be overcome through a variety of techniques.

This post describes a few of the techniques.

For grand and grind both

Some of the techniques are better suited to a formal session – a corporate retreat for instance – but most are just as useful in the daily grind as the strategic grand.

There are hundreds of brainstorming techniques ranging from the classic room full of shouting people to silently writing ideas on cards and passing them to the next person until there is no more room on the card.

The techniques have different strengths and weaknesses. Silent brainstorming – sometimes called “brainwriting” – works better for introverts and avoids the tendency to lend more weight to initial ideas than later ones.1 John Boitnott describes ten techniques for groups, including mind mapping. I use mind mapping by myself to organize ideas rather than generate them but that’s just me.

Part of the art of brainstorming is selecting the technique that suits the situation and the group. So, it is important to have a large vocabulary of brainstorming techniques at your disposal. After one promotion, I found that my new management team was more introverted than the teams I had been used to. I had to adapt. I am naturally an ideas shouting guy but, as the saying goes, you bait the hook with what the fish likes not what you like.

The techniques I find most helpful impose an artificial constraint or a different perspective. What is true of poets is true of planners.

Artificial constraint

Stanford professor Tina Seelig had her class play Scrabble. She loosened or tightened the rules every ten minutes. She found that the tighter the rules, the more creative and collaborative the players became.2

Artificial constraint ranges from questions like the classic “what would you do if you had one month to live?” to “how can you cut your staff and budget by 15% while maintaining performance standards?”

It works even better when the constraint is real. Libby Sartain, then Vice-President of People at Southwest Airlines explained they created the “ten minute turn around” when they were forced to sell one of their planes and needed to maintain the same schedule with three planes as they had with four.

A different perspective

Fully five of Boitnott’s ten techniques – reverse storming, superstorming, changing your attributes, figuring storming, teleporting storming – involve adopting a different perspective. In “figuring storming” you might ask how Paddington Bear would deal with the problem while in superstorming you might ask how the X-Men would.

I’ve used reverse storming successfully many times, always with good results. It seems it’s easier to identify good management characteristics by asking people to list the characteristics of the worst manager they’d ever worked for and then flipping them. A great way to improve security is to ask people what they’d do if they’d just been demoted and wanted to take revenge without getting caught, and what they’d do if they’d just been fired and didn’t care whether they get caught or not.

Rules of brainstorming

A lot of brainstorming has gone into establishing “rules” for brainstorming. Google turned up 6,890,000 results when I decided to see if my personal rule book was up to date. It was, because the rules haven’t changed, they’ve been restated more than six million ways. You may find other formulations resonate more for you, so I’ve included a few links that I think are particularly good in a footnote.3

Here's what I think are the key rules that appear in one form or other in every list and apply to every brainstorming technique.

1. Create a safe environment for crazy ideas

A safe environment for ideas is the most important rule and it applies even when ideas are just being tossed around informally.

New ideas are like babies, vulnerable and defended by a fiercely protective parent. Separate creation from analysis or, as Hemingway said: “Write drunk, edit sober”.

Initially I found brainstorming with lawyers especially challenging. They like to pounce on ideas like a wolf pack on a lamb. Some preferred dismembering the first-born idea to birthing a better one. To create a nursery for newborn ideas we did three things:

Mercilessly shut down analysis during brainstorming.
Ensure lots of time for discussion and analysis after brainstorming, otherwise it is impossible to shut down analysis during brainstorming.
Invite people to float ideas they don’t agree with for the fun of seeing if anyone else does.

You won’t find the third bullet in the literature, but it worked with the lawyers – because it removed parental responsibility for ideas.

Fear of ridicule stifles creativity and suggestions. On every brainstorming website and in every book you’ll see quotes like “There are no dumb ideas”, “don’t criticize other people’s ideas”, “Postpone…judgment…encourage wild ideas...every person and every idea has equal worth.”

I am prone to buffoonery. It is disadvantageous in the legal profession but I think it helps brainstorming. Crazy ideas are the building blocks of great ideas. If you want creativity you have to make it safe for craziness. The best brainstorming facilitators aren’t necessarily funny, but they are fun.

You can’t create a safe meeting in an unsafe culture. It’s no good telling people there are no dumb ideas if they fear their dumb idea will show up in their performance appraisal or, worse, the lunch room. People bring their baggage to meetings, and they leave with it. If brainstorming isn’t working, check under the hood for a cultural problem.

2. Move fast and favour quantity over quality.

Set a fast pace. The more ideas you hear, the more ideas you get. That’s the engine of a lot of great brainstorming. Pacing is another reason to shutdown analysis, including internal analysis. Long dissertations are pace killers. So, get people to talk or write in headlines, not essays, by reminding them that there will be time for explanation later during the analysis phase.

3. Build on the ideas of others.

I wish I’d coined the term “Velcro ideas”. It not only invites building but makes it easier to float half formed ideas. If you invite people to say “this might be a Velcro idea” you encourage people who normally must think things through to pitch in recklessly.

This rule builds on the other rules. It promotes a safe environment, helps maintain the pace, and is where crazy ideas begin to turn into great ones.

You can promote or impair building in a lot of small ways. Some of the behaviours commonly referred to as strong leadership, decisiveness, and clarity of vision, are antithetical to group creativity. When I became a manager, I had to stifle the competitive advocacy skills that made me a good lawyer and won me promotion.

4. If you are hosting a brainstorming session, plan it as carefully as you would any other important meeting.

Identify the desired outcome, prepare an agenda and materials, invite the right people, and so on. For brainstorming sessions, I like to prepare two or three techniques, verbal and non-verbal, and be ready to switch from one to another depending on the group. Then there is the question of who will lead or facilitate the brainstorming session and, if you are planning on using a flip chart to record ideas, who can write as fast as the group can talk?

Explain and expect to explain again what needs to be done and why. That usually involves setting out:

the reason ideas are required and the parameters for discussion,
boundaries and constraints artificial and real (i.e., budgets, time frames, permissions, laws etc.…),
the type and rules of the brainstorming technique to be employed,
follow up including the group discussion and decision process.

Professor Seelig makes a crucial point I often forget to my detriment, “The question you ask is the frame into which the answers will fall.”