How to Ensure Efficient Brainstorming Sessions

If you work in a creative environment like Marketing or Design, you’re more than familiar with the concept of brainstorming. It’s used in all kinds of situations where thinking outside the box is required to find outstanding solutions.

To ensure you have a productive brainstorming, you should have two goals in mind:

When people feel like they’re in a natural environment, they’ll be comfortable enough to share all their ideas publicly. Creating this kind of space is more straightforward than you’d expect. I recommend you follow these guidelines:

We all fear being judged by our peers or superiors, especially in creative areas where there’s not just one correct way of doing and seeing things. That’s why the entire team needs to know this: they’re in a creative space where all the ideas are accepted. Nobody is going to judge them even if they say something completely absurd.

There’s no wrong answer. Something you’re afraid to say because it’s out of the ordinary might be a stroke of genius that could revolutionize your field. Or it could be a somewhat decent idea that your team adds on to create something spectacular. Two bad ideas might lead to one genius idea.

Ask for explanations when necessary, but avoid criticism at all costs. It’ll prevent people from shutting down and not contributing to the brainstorming.

Be sure to reinforce this concept in your brainstorming session by making sure the critical people know to keep their mean comments to themselves.

Write down everything without saying no to any ideas. After all, this is a storm, and storms are not pretty: they’re messy and chaotic, and they go on their way without caring about anybody and anything, but brainstorming should be fun for everyone.

Suffer through the bad without saying no to it, and the result will appear eventually, even better than you’ve anticipated.

I was tempted to say, “No technology at all,” but that’s just not possible in our times. Technology has become such an integrated and natural part of our lives we don’t even notice it anymore. And then there’s the issue of remote or hybrid teams, where technology is a must.

So what I recommend instead is to minimize distractions as much as possible, especially when you want efficient brainstorming sessions. Therefore, I can only recommend tools that encourage deep focus and productivity.

Sessions is a video conferencing platform that brings in one space all the necessary tools for excellent and efficient brainstorming. The fact that they’re all in one place reduces the friction and time lost when switching back and forth between apps.

Some of the Sessions’ integrations are with Miro, Figma, Canva and Adobe XD, which allows you to use all these tools in the video conferencing platform. You’ll be able to see and hear your participants while brainstorming.

It also has integrations with YouTube, Twitch and Google Docs, so you can display videos or collaborate in real-time with all your team members in a document.

It’s a great platform designed to encourage collaboration, productivity and time efficiency. I highly recommend trying out Sessions for your brainstorming.

What other tactics do you use to ensure your brainstorming sessions have the best outcome?