Running Better Meetings: Brainstorming

We've all been there. Someone needs an idea -- a good idea -- so he or she calls a brainstorming meeting. A long, useless, mind-numbing, terrible, time-wasting, life-sucking, day-ruining brainstorming meeting.

I hate them. I hate them, because most time, they're not run well. Or, in some cases, run at all.

It doesn't have to be this way. You actually can get some good results from these meetings, provided you structure and execute them well.

Define The Parameters
One of the biggest issues with Brainstorming meetings is that the scope of the meeting is ill-defined. You get everyone in place, ready to go, and the "box" for ideas is simply too large, and you get frustratingly out-of-place ideas. Then you get angry. Then sad. Sometimes a little hungry. Mostly, though, you get frustrated -- and no further to your goal.

This is why it’s critical you tightly define what you're looking for. The more narrow your constraints, the better ideas you will get. I know, at first glance, this seems counter-intuitive. You would think that having a wide-open playing field would be best.

Trust me. It's not.

Creativity thrives on constraint. Remember, what you're really trying to do with this brainstorming session is solve a problem. You can't solve a problem unless you define it -- which means defining your parameters.

Demand Preparation
Many times these meetings get called spur-of-the-moment. This is a mistake. If you give the participants some time to prep and ask that they come to the meeting with a few ideas you get a couple of benefits.

1: You get people's mind on the problem early -- letting them think and create on their own prior to the meeting, effectively "seeding" the idea pool. This will allow you to get some good ideas out early, build momentum, and provide fodder for other people to latch on to and build off of.

2: You get to weed out the tourists. Design is often alluring, it's glamorous, it's intriguing, and it's attractive. People want to feel involved in the direction of their product. This is good and should be encouraged, but when you're looking for ideas, you want people willing to provide them. Demanding preparation means anyone coming to the meeting will be committed, willing, and ready to provide you with ideas.

Keep It Short
Unless you really get on a roll (which will happen in a few rare and awesome cases) keep your Brainstorming meetings to around 20-30 minutes. Longer than this and ideas tend to degenerate and wander. Typically, in a meeting, everyone will rattle off the "low hanging fruit" ideas in the first 5-7 minutes -- Throwing up the obvious, the easy, and most often the useless. This process is actually important, as it 'clears the pipes' for actual creativity and critical thinking you're looking for. Once the "real" brainstorming begins there'll be a short window of good, productive ideas. Once this window closes, though, ideas will begin to loop back and repeat, and people will start honing in on idea flaws, instead of working on idea synthesis. That's the time to shut it down. Now, 20-30 minutes is not a hard and fast rule. If you're running the meeting, you'll need to go by feel. Sometimes ideas will run dry quickly, other times everyone will keep rolling. Just keep an eye out for when productivity ends and call the meeting -- don't keep going to hit some pre-defined time.

Keep It Small
A large scale brainstorming meeting with many people can be done, but it's very difficult and often not as productive as a smaller scoped meeting. The larger the meeting, the fewer number of people will actually talk. If you can keep the count to 6-10, you'll get a good critical mass -- enough people to generate and build off ideas, but small enough that you'll generally get good participation. The key here is making sure you get the right people in the room: People with ideas, and people who are invested in the outcome.

There Is Judgment in Brainstorming
Most directives on Brainstorming tell you to never judge ideas. This is crap. Fact of the matter is, in any Brainstorming session, you're going to get bad ideas -- those are fine, but what you want to cull out are "derailing" ideas. Ideas so terrible, so off topic, or so inflammatory that they're counter productive. If possible do this with some humor, but however you do it, be sure it gets done. These ideas are meeting killers. They're so bad, that people will fixate on them. You don't want this.

That said, while you want to shut down the idea, you do NOT want to shut down the idea-giver. So, when this situation comes up (and it will) do what you can to encourage the idea giver to turn the derailing idea into something productive, encourage them to participate, but don't write their meeting-killer of an idea up on the board just because some brainstorming book or website said to "write everything down." Again. That's crap.

Get Everyone Involved
On occasion a brainstorming participant is going to dominate a meeting. Every game company has a few strong personalities. These people often have good ideas and should be heard. What you need to keep an eye out for is letting these people run the meeting. Let them have their say, but then ask around the room -- actually call on the quiet ones-- ask them if they have an idea, or if they even have a comment or something to build off another idea. Just as every game company has strong personalities, every game company is going to have quiet ones too -- and these folks have ideas just as good and useful as the boisterous of your crowd. Get them involved, talk to them, encourage them.

Be Ready for a Game-Changing Revelation
I've seen this happen more frequently than people like to admit. Many times, designers -- being problem solvers -- work furiously to come up with brilliant, ingenious, and elegant solutions to the difficult problems that come up on a daily basis. Brainstorming meetings are tool for this. That said, every once in a while, in the course of a brainstorming meeting, as you're all tossing out ideas left-and-right to solve your problem, someone will come up with a particularly profound insight.

You're not solving the right problem.

When this happens, acknowledge it, and shut down the meeting -- even if it's one of those "holy-crap-we-have-to-have-a-solution-today-or-the-planet-will-implode" situations. Shut it down, even for ten minutes, so that people can adjust their mindset to the new revelation, and frame their ideas to address the new situation.

What you don't want to do is keep burrowing down the old, and now obviously wrong, path. Acknowledge and accept that the situation has fundamentally changed.

Wrapping Up
As you come to the end of your meeting, take a minute or two to highlight key ideas or concepts that have filtered up to the top, or that people in the meeting have naturally gravitated towards. While you may not have a solution there, you have some foundational grit to work with. At a minimum, you should have some good material for a follow up meeting, and in a catastrophic worst-case, nothing-remotely-useful-was-produced situation, you can use what's there to go back to step one, and better define your parameters so that the next meeting on the topic will better.

In the end, don't be afraid to experiment with your brainstorming meetings, and if you stick to a shorter timeframe, you can have a few more, allowing you to iterate a bit, and find a mix that works best for your company, project, or team.