Episode #412: How To Run Brainstorming Sessions When Everyone Is At Home

Pandemics force change. We keep thinking we have turned the corner in Japan, to be just shunted further down the road with another lockdown. Being the eternal optimist from sunny Australia, I was running around telling my team we would see things get back to a better situation this October. Now I read that A1 predictor modelling indicates we will peak in October. That means things won’t get back to normal or closer to normal until early 2022. That is a lot of cash flow needed between now and then. Trying to bring the full intellectual power of the team to bear on a severe problem through brainstorming, has been a good way of finding ideas, to make sure you make it out the other side of this pandemic.

With more contagious virus variants now the majority of new cases, no wonder staff don’t want to huddle together and do brainstorming sessions. Does that mean that we have to forego the idea generation power of the team to come up with ideas to solve the dilemmas facing us? In some cases it probably makes zero difference, because what they were doing for brainstorming was broken and ineffective anyway. The classic scenario of the boss wielding the whiteboard marker like a light sabre and slicing and dicing people on the spot, if their ideas didn’t match expectations, was ridiculous before and is still ridiculous.

The bolshie assertive few got all of their ideas up on the board and the deeper thinkers were left to just eat dust, as the whole process rattled forward at a clip. The psychologically unsafe environment ensured the introverts were left out, as were the young, the female and the junior. It doesn’t matter how you wrangle the brainstorming session if you do it this way. In fact, not doing it would probably be much better for morale.

We are arranged at home now, together alone. Can we tap into ideas anyway? Absolutely and we can make the session valuable. The methodology though is much clunkier than in person, much harder logistically and requires more time. Welcome to online platforms everyone.

Here is how we can do it. Pose the question to be answered and check for understanding, so that everyone is on the same page. Have each person type their answers concisely in a document they can share later. They can elaborate on what they want say when they share their ideas, so we don’t need sentences, just some key words as banners for the idea. This is done independently, so there is no chatter while this is underway. It might be 15 minutes of thinking time needed to really get people to go deep on their ideas. We are going for volume at this point not for genius.

Next, we divide up into groups and head off to the breakout rooms. Usually in person, we would go for groups of five or six, but in this online logistical nightmare, three people per group is better. In the room, each person shares their screen and goes through what they wrote down, explaining what they meant. This is not a moment for debate or evaluation. We just understand the point. Remember, my crazy, whacky, impractical idea might trigger your brilliant insight.

Once we have explained our ideas, we look for similar ideas which can be placed in the same basket of idea categories. We move ideas around through copy and paste until we have them grouped together under the category title. We now have everyone from every group come back to the main room and each group shares their categories and ideas. Again, no critique is allowed, as this is just for further stimulation of the next level of ideas.

Back into silent contemplation of further ideas. This might be eight minutes or longer depending on the problem. We need to give everyone enough thinking time, because some people are very deep thinkers. Then we go back to the breakout rooms and add the ideas to the categories we came up with before and create any new categories as needed. Again, we share the ideas without comment on the quality of the idea. Depending on time available, we can go back to the main room and share all the groups ideas again. If time permits, we do another round of five minutes of thinking time and whole the process repeated, as we head back to the breakout rooms.

Once we have gathered together all of the ideas, we stay in the breakout rooms and work on prioritising the ideas in each category. The idea is to find the top 3, 5 or top 10 ideas from each category. This is where the evaluation takes place as we choose between competing ideas for the best possible insights.

Everyone comes back to the main room and each group introduces their top ideas from each category. Each group’s ideas are then added together on screen and further prioritisation takes place, until we come up with the best ideas for each category from the whole group. This can take a lot of time and require a lot of discussion. It may be held off to another session because online anything is tiring for too long.

The keys to success are individual contemplation in silence and sufficient time to think. Also, no evaluation takes place until the very end, when hard choices between good ideas have to be made. It is technically more complex than being in a room together, but it is a lot safer. It requires more time, yet the quality of the output can be excellent. Certainly better than the tender mercies of whiteboard pen wielding maniac bosses.