Running A Moderately Effective Off-The-Cuff Brainstorming Session At Work

"Hey Guy - is this afternoon a good time for brainstorming [a certain project]? I'll send an invitation to everyone shortly. Is it OK for you to run the brainstorming session today?"

Yes, it's definitely okay. I have a script I use for off-the-cuff brainstorming sessions. It's very simple and moderately effective, but importantly is very consistently moderately effective.

  1. Decide the topic. I will usually pick "the entire project, except with this particular goal or this particular constraint". Today, I chose to focus everyone on our internal beliefs about the analysis and numbers underlying the project, explicitly ignoring the external-facing view on the underlying fundamentals.
  2. Write up a short summary of background material. What do participants need to know, minimally, to do some brainstorming? Are we going to be focusing on the entire thing, one portion of the thing, or what? This should be readable and digestible in under 3 minutes.
  3. Once everyone is present, tell them to read and digest the background material. When everyone is done, ask for clarifying questions. Answer them. If you have to make up an answer that focuses the discussion one way rather than another, say you're doing so, and do it.
  4. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Tell everyone to write down their initial thoughts on what might be important, techniques to use, dependencies they see, or whatnot. Independently! Answer any further questions.
  5. Start the timer. Write your own thoughts.
  6. Have everyone paste what they wrote into a shared wiki. Tell everyone to read everyone else's writings. Read them yourself. A couple minutes after you're done, figure out if everyone else is done or close to done.
  7. Open discussion. Take copious notes, shared with everyone. I share screen while editing the wiki everyone pasted into to add notes at the bottom.
  8. If everything stalls for at least 45 seconds, facilitate a restart. Useful techniques are asking if there's anything particular interesting or notable they read that someone else wrote. Ask someone what they meant by a certain line that you didn't understand. State your own thoughts on what someone wrote; keep these in reserve to keep the discussion going rather than handing them out early. Near the end, go back up through the pasted brainstorming and look line-by-line for things that haven't been discussed yet, and ask what people think about them.
  9. Finish by saying thanks, and noting the action items, which are usually "okay now so-and-so (or I) will take all of this and produce real action items".

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