Un-breaking the Broken Brainstorm: Spotting The 5 Worst Formats
Brainstorming should be a fertile ground for limitless creativity and rapid innovation, but sadly not all brainstorms achieve this goal. All too often, the format of the session itself can inadvertently stifle participation, favor certain personality styles over others, and yield uninspired ideas. Here are five types of brainstorms that fall short of their potential, typically resulting in a smaller number of underwhelming ideas.
The Dominator-Led Brainstorm:
In this brainstorm, a small handful of highly-assertive individuals dominate the discussion, drowning out quieter voices and sidelining diverse perspectives. This type of brainstorm becomes heavily influenced by a few individuals’ beliefs, emotions and preferences. The resulting creative ideas are often heavily informed by the dominators’ implicit biases around how to approach the problem, the types of solutions they might favor, their assumptions about the end-audience, and so on. Unfortunately, the dominator-led brainstorm is quite common, and almost always yields fewer, narrower ideas. Even worse, it has a knock-on effect of de-motivating the others who didn’t have space to participate. Those folks may not raise their hands to join the next brainstorm, or they may begin to adopt a learned behavior of attending the meeting to show face, but not contributing if they don’t feel they will be heard.
The Hierarchical Brainstorm:
Hierarchical brainstorms suffer from power dynamics that inhibit open dialogue. Senior leaders' opinions carry outsized weight and may inadvertently discourage junior team members from opening up. When brainstorms become top-down, they limit the diversity of ideas and hamper innovation. This can sometimes be seen in multi-level brainstorms where senior leaders instinctively go first in conversation, setting the tone and unfortunately biasing the conversation in one direction or another. It can also manifest where senior leaders subtly or overtly overrule junior team members’ contributions. Even a lack of affirmation from well-meaning senior leaders can be heard by others as a “no” – steering the conversation in one way or another. Like the dominator-led brainstorm, this unfortunately limits the creativity in the room – both in the diversity of ideas, and the number of ideas generated. And like the dominator-led brainstorm, this almost always creates knock-on demotivating effects with the team.
The Verbal-Only Brainstorm:
Verbal-only brainstorms are a bit like listening to the old-school radio. Only one person can speak at a time, and there’s no fast-forwarding, rewinding or skipping. By its very nature, this limits the number of ideas that can be generated within a given timeframe. Worse still, this format almost always falls prey to dominators and power dynamics. But even in in the best case, the verbal-only format manages to disadvantage the large majority of individuals who think visually or prefer hands-on approaches, leading to a narrower range of ideas and stifled creativity. Only about 30% of people can effectively process verbal-only information. 60-65% need visuals, and 5-10% are kinesthetic – learning by touching/making/doing. Most people are a combination of two – for example, I am visual-kinesthetic. When the brainstorm only favors the 30%, it unfortunately sends a message to the other 70% that they are not valued.
The Groupthink Brainstorm:
Often fostered by dominators and power dynamics, groupthink occurs when participants conform to the prevailing opinions or attitudes within the group, resulting in a lack of critical thinking and exploration of alternative perspectives. In these brainstorms, dissenting voices may be suppressed, leading to a homogeneous pool of ideas that fail to challenge the status quo. This is a distortion of the well-intentioned idea of “yes-and” that unfortunately falls prey to the bandwagon or herd effect. People often come into brainstorms with protecting their reputation as a stronger intrinsic motivation than breaking new creative ground. It’s much safer to go along, than to rock the boat with crazy left-field ideas. In dominator-led and/or hierarchical environments where there is little psychological safety for debate and discussion, groupthink unfortunately becomes the norm.
The Rushed Brainstorm:
In time-constrained brainstorms, participants may feel pressured to generate ideas quickly, sacrificing quality for quantity. Without time for reflection and exploration, brainstorming sessions become superficial, yielding ideas that lack originality and insight. On occasion, rapid-fire brainstorms can work for divergent ideation…it takes 4,000 ideas to get to a new shoe, a colleague once told me about their experience at Nike. But in subsequent stages such as idea-selection and idea-development, time is needed for constructive debate, poking holes, and meaningful elaboration such as what-if, how-will-it-work, what-will-it-look-like, and so on. Too often a quick one-hour brainstorm captures a few shallow ideas, and folks move on.
Meaningfully overcoming these obstacles can feel like a mountain to climb. But with patience, nurture and intention, the organization can create a truly inclusive, empowering environment that welcomes and affirms ideas from everyone. When this happens, the volume and diversity of ideas increases exponentially, and all the work gets better. Whether new products, transformations, process improvements, or creative campaigns, everyone in the enterprise has ideas with merit. It’s our job as facilitators and leaders to create an environment that unlocks them.
