Deep brainstorming

As a knowledge worker, you have most likely participated in numerous brainstorming sessions and like me walked away with a feeling of urge to improve the process.

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

Broad brainstorming

A classic brainstorming session typically consists of 4–5 steps:

1. Idea generation on PostIt notes — often individually done and timeboxed to 5–10 minutes.
2. Presentation and grouping of generated ideas.
3. Summarization and headlining of grouped ideas.
4. [optional] Arrangement of grouped ideas on two axes, e.g., effort vs value.
5. Agree on which ideas to prioritize for further development.

This tested and well-proved process has generated millions of ideas over the past decades, but, in my view, it suffers from the following shortcomings.

First, idea generation is typically done without interaction with the other participants in the session. This hampers the cross-pollination of ideas as your colleagues’ ideas are not inspiring you. An easy remedy is to allow participants to add additional ideas in the presentation round (step 2). Second, the presentation round (step 2) can become rather lengthy and it is easy to lose track of the ideas that have been presented. This is especially the case if you have more than five…