Brainstorming: The Key Steps to Success

Over my time I have sat in many idea generation or brainstorming sessions both within media and advertising agencies, hotshops and on the client side or with the client. These sessions can be to generate ideas for an individual campaign, a long-term strategy, a product launch or they might very well be for your next new business pitch.

Amongst these sessions though, only very few have been in my opinion highly successful. The reason is quite simple. There has been a lacking brief, lack of structure, no leadership and no real collaboration.

The Brief

Mentioned in my earlier blog, the brief is vital. What exactly are we aiming to achieve from the session. What are our objectives & what do we already know. Sessions take time and that means money for you, so lets be sure that we have a good brief that outlays exactly what we intend to achieve during the session.

Structure and Process

I don’t want to take the fun out of these sessions because that is what they are all about but you do need some structure to tackle the brief. The structure does a few things. It ensures we maximise the time we spend in these sessions constructively. It ensures everybody gets to put ideas in. It ensures we cover all the points we need to and most of all it ensures that when we leave & finish the meeting, we leave with an action list of clear indicators & the key persons involved in ensuring those tasks are met.

A good session while structured doesn’t really feel structured. Like the term brainstorm, we start by dumping down lots of ideas. From these ideas we decide which are the most innovative and interesting and which best meet the objectives of the brief. When we have a few good ideas we can move forward – expand them, dig deeper, pull out insights, and create example case studies and so on until we feel we have our winning idea. The winning idea will often come in a second or third session after we have analyzed our key ideas in more detail.

Make sure in all cases before a meeting is over that everybody who has attended agrees with the idea & that everybody is cleary aware of what they are required to do to get to the next stage.

Session leader

In all cases, there should be a person in the session that is the session leader – the person who structures the workshop, understands the brief in minute detail, a person that listens to others, mediates and writes ideas down. This person should be skilled in running ideas/brainstorming sessions and a creative mind. The person should help the group move along in a clearly structured manner.

Without this person, we essentially normally end up having lots of ideas but no central focus – people walk away from the session with a smile but when they sit down, they don’t really know what next…

Collaboration

I have been involved with many new business pitches. The great ones show real collaboration, they show that the team worked brilliantly together and they all believe in the idea and their ability to deliver it. The successful sessions are fun, a birth of great ideas from everybody and in the end a united approach that shows very clear collaboration.  The unsuccessful ones seem to have people working in modules – one digital guy creating digital ideas, one print person creating print ideas and one television person creating television ideas – no integration between the overall idea. The idea should show that all parties have worked together seemlessly on all aspects of the project.

I could continue to write more about good and bad sessions but to wrap it up, just remember what these sessions are for! Its business, we all have limited time and resources so plan & think strategically at all times BUT also remember to be super creative – don’t let the structure and process ruin the creativity required to build great ideas…