Guidelines for brainstorming
To set your brainstorm up for success, it's important to follow some basic guidelines for each stage of the brainstorming process.
Before the brainstorm
Send an agenda
By preparing an agenda beforehand, you accomplish two things:
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You clarify your own thinking and research the problem to be solved rather than placing the burden of understanding it immediately on others. This preparation might help you hone in on the people to invite rather than including individuals who don't actually need to be there.
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You show respect to the time, attention, and creativity of those you are inviting by giving them context and an opportunity to do deep thinking beforehand and ask any clarifying questions. This is especially impactful for more introverted collaborators who aren't great at participating on the spot. Research has shown that people tend to produce better ideas when they think alone first. Then, when the group meets together with their prepared ideas, they are able to collaborate more effectively to identify and develop the best solutions.
If you're invited to a brainstorming session without an agenda, ask for one! Lack of context creates confusion for everyone on the invite list, and speaking up ensures the time spent is actually effective.
The most focused ideas emerge when a group aligns on the specific problem and the boundaries surrounding it. As you draft the agenda, define your constraints such as budget, timeline, technical limitations, and brand requirements to shape the output. Frame the session with a prompting question, such as âWhat are ways we can increase sales next quarter?â and share it one to two days in advance. Providing this clarity early on empowers your team to arrive informed.
Set up your meeting board in Lucid
By recording everything in a central location like a team space, you can seamlessly move from live ideation as a group to asynchronous idea pruningâor vice versa, if you'd prefer to brainstorm asynchronously and then meet afterward to discuss ideas live.
Template link and image: https://lucid.co/templates/meeting-agenda-templateÂ
Caption: Use our free meeting agenda template to inform participants and keep the brainstorm on track.
Understand your team's preferred collaboration styles
Whether you're facilitating a brainstorming session or just participating in one, understanding your group's collaboration styles can help you tailor your discussion so everyone feels heard.
This is also a good moment to sanity-check whether a live meeting is the best format for the work or whether youâll get better input asynchronously first (or even entirely). There are many different ways to run an effective brainstorming session, and it is less important what the brainstorming looks like than whether it meets the needs and goals of the group.
During the brainstorm
Choose a framework or template
It can be challenging to balance freeform brainstorms with structured ideation.
Using a template as a framework for your brainstorming provides enough structure to focus your ideation on a discrete problem while still leaving space to document novel ideas.
Templates also lower the barrier to engagement for more reserved team members because they provide a framework that makes it easier to generate ideas rather than staring at a blank canvas.
^Open our brainstorming template to help guide your group through a productive ideation session.
If you want a simple set of guidelines to reinforce while you use a template, Alex Osbornâs classic brainstorming principles map well to modern sessions:
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Focus on quantity so the group generates lots of raw material before narrowing.
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Withhold criticism to keep people from self-censoring early.
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Welcome unusual ideas because unique ideas often unlock breakthroughs.
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Combine and improve ideas so the group builds toward stronger solutions instead of treating ideas as precious or fixed.
Don't worry about duplicate ideas
There is a tendency to self-prune as you brain dump and delete duplicate ideas in the name of efficiency. This is counterintuitive, as similar ideas from team members can indicate a natural consensus. Pausing to prune duplicate ideas also slows down your ideation.
Remember: There is always time to consolidate after the team has had time to consider what you generated during your brainstorm. In Lucid, you can quickly sort and summarize ideas with Lucid AI.
Set a timer
Constraints can be useful in brainstorming sessions (especially when you have a limited amount of time with your group), and setting a timer is one of the easiest constraints you can introduce.
Try breaking up your brainstorm into distinct unitsâlike brain-dumping, group evaluation, and votingâand set timers for each. This structure can help you maintain momentum throughout your whole brainstorm. It also prevents the slog that can happen when teams spend too much time on one phase of the brainstorm, as well as the rush that happens at the end of meetings when teams realize they spent too much time on a tangent and didn't get to the most important items.
In practice, many teams find that shorter sessions can improve focusâespecially if participants prepare ahead of time. Shorter meetings help keep the group focused. When you have limited time to get all the ideas out there, people tend to stay on track. Aim for just 15-30 minutes. A shorter meeting means your group will need to come prepared and that youâll need a clear agenda.
Pro tip: Pay attention to when you schedule the meeting as well. Late afternoon tends to be when people are more sluggish and mentally fatiguedâand watching the clock until they can go home. Not a great recipe for innovation.
Break out into smaller groups
If you have a big problem to tackle, splitting your group into smaller subgroups can be a beneficial approach, ideally with no more than 10 people.
Smaller groups can help generate more quality ideas, since each person will have more opportunity to speak up when they spend a majority of the brainstorming in a group of three or four instead of fighting for attention in a big group. Once the timer is up, have the entire group meet back up to share ideas.
If you're using Lucid, you can easily do this with breakout boards.
Invite a diverse team of people so you can uncover new ideas and approaches to a problem. Donât invite people who are too far removed from the issueâyou want to encourage dialogue and buy-in for this process. If the issue isnât relevant to a person or they are too far removed from the issue, they will have a harder time contributing meaningfully to the discussion.
Leverage Lucid AI
Sometimes, the hardest part of a brainstorm is getting the ball rolling. Lucid AI can inject your brainstorming session with the spark it needs to be successful. This feature helps you and your team generate, sort, and summarize the contents of your brainstorm, create visuals, and more.
Even with AI support, youâll get better outcomes if the facilitator actively protects the session from common pitfalls like groupthink and âblockingâ (where only one person can speak at a time and others lose their ideas while listening).
One reliable way to counter these pitfalls is to start with quiet, individual idea generation, such as typing on virtual sticky notes, and then sharing with the group.
After the brainstorm
Revisit your goals
After the brainstorm, review the agenda and ideas on the board while asking the following questions:
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Did we accomplish our goal?
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Does this meet the customer need we set out to solve for?
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Do we have enough breadth of ideas, or are there other avenues we need to explore?
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Is there sufficient potential for depth in the ideas we have to meet the needs of this project?
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Are our ideas feasible given the scope, timing, and budget of the project?
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Have we been appropriately intensive and innovative in our thinking?
Don't be afraid to schedule more time
Sometimes a problem is too big to handle in 30 or 60 minutes. Assuming your discussion was productive and participants were engaged, consider scheduling more brainstorming time for a later date as needed.
You could invite a smaller group the second time to keep the discussion more tightly focused, and you should encourage participants to refer to the notes from the first session to treat the additional meeting as a continuation of the discussion and not a cold start.
Prioritize ideas to develop and set action items
As you do further brainstorming work, start converging around ideas and setting priorities based on your discussions with your team. As the project unfolds, you can even convert your ideas into Lucid Cards to set tasks in motion. The best part is that Lucid Cards integrates with popular project and product management apps like airfocus, Jira, and Azure DevOps, so you can instantly sync information and stay on track.
Thank the participants
This one is easy! Sending a personalized message to one of your fellow collaborators, acknowledging a unique idea of theirs you liked or their engagement in the session, can strengthen team morale and inspire people to engage even more in future brainstorming sessions because they feel their voice is valued.
