Why Group Brainstorming Sessions Fail (5 Unorthodox Methods To Fix Them)

NOTE: This is a long story piece. Go directly to see 5 unorthodox methods for effective group brainstorming, or read on to see how these unorthodox methods came to be and why whitespacing and co-creation are important.

This story article goes into my own journey through the world of meetings and group brainstorming sessions throughout my early career, and how I realized how we need a different set of tools for both. My story is a familiar one to many struggling to get more out of group brainstorming sessions that are treated like meetings, so hopefully, it can help you in your own group brainstorming sessions too.

Some say group brainstorming sessions don’t work, but it’s actually the process that needs to be understood for them to be effective.

My Early Work Meetings & Brainstorming Sessions

For many years meetings were (some still are) the core of the executive decisions made in all kinds of companies. While group brainstorming sessions and target-based meetings are inherently different, many workplaces often approach creative sessions with the same mindset as logical target meetings, whilst expecting different results.

I remember my first meeting as a young Design Lead in a fairly large and established SME business around the age of 24-25. I was 3 years out of university. I had a bit of real work experience before and during university, but I certainly had to be humbled before entering the world of work on a full-time basis.

I had so many ideas floating around on a minute-by-minute basis of how this could solve this, or that could solve that, but even in the world of design and advertising, I had quickly noticed how your ideas didn’t really matter as much as your status and job title did.

It is different today but there’s still something about meetings and sessions that tends to massage an ego rather than get tasks done effectively.

It took a good couple of years, plus a year in between of helping out my Dad switch his business online until I finally was in a position to call myself ‘qualified’ enough to have my say.

I entered my first proper formal meeting filled with design heads, clients and those account managers who were basically liaison officers saying the right things to the right people without really adding that much real value to the table (to be fair their job was more about keeping the clients and design team in cohorts).

As a pretty fresh-faced worker (and also looking 5 years younger than my 25 years at the time) compared to all the 30-somethings and beyond around the table I will admit I was a bit apprehensive at first.

If anyone has suffered writer’s block then you’ll know what I mean. It’s like being really good at a sport or game, and suddenly the pressure is put on and you forget everything. (All that verbal diarrhea that we spouted off at uni knowing we could change the world better than the guys currently in the qualified positions was quickly put in place as the world became real rather than imagined).

I’d prepped the night before on the off-chance my input was actually required. I would sit and wait for the around-the-table discussions to complete. Ones which were all very much status-driven rather than solution-based and all keeping people in their relative comfort zone (or uncomfortable zone in my case).

While I can’t talk about specific meetings and projects that were discussed within them, I can say almost all of them had the same format, almost without fail.

After a while of expecting the same thing your brain switches into auto-pilot pretty quickly. Then when you are finally asked to contribute instead of being at the ready with some insightful disruption you almost automatically just nod and agree with the others in the room.

So much for all those wonderful hours spent in prep in how I could make my presence known. When it came down to it the room was already in ghost mode. No one would really hear anything different as they were also so used to the draining repetition of the meetings, to speak and pretend to listen until they can speak again. They were on auto-pilot too.

When that first meeting had finished, I must have uttered only a few words, my name, and ‘err’ a couple of times. The second and third passed without much input sought also, but it did give me a chance to observe and ponder.

I wasn’t observing to see how I should act in a meeting, I was seeing what was really the problem with them and why they were seemingly just a massive waste of time of ego massaging that seemingly led nowhere.

How Meetings Were Ineffective Time & Creative Energy Sappers

These observations helped shaped the journey and alternative career path I decided to go on afterward, as I learned two main things pretty quickly:

Firstly, I wasn’t going to turn into a corporate drone. I had no interest in working purely for a job title and money. It had to engage my creative mind first and foremost. I was young enough and without responsibilities to afford that decision.

Secondly, there was something fundamentally wrong with how these meetings were being conducted. This wasn’t concluded because I wasn’t allowed to get my say. It wasn’t my crushed ego. At first, I thought it might’ve been, but after a few repeats of the same conducted meeting sessions (and seeing it in many places afterward) I realized something else.

The main thing that was stopping progression in this meeting wasn’t the content being discussed but the manner in which it was.

If I had creative block as a creative, what did the others who weren’t creative have?

They had more experience and a manual of fixes to install for existing problems, but oftentimes their experience of sitting in meetings or brainstorming sessions didn’t teach them how to deal with new problems, ones which didn’t require any of those tools they already had.

You would think brainstorming sessions would be different from generic meetings, but they often followed the same format that ‘closed-off’ creative input, rather than engaged it.

It dawned on me that the solutions that were often engineered in meetings were nearly always target-based rather than solution-based. It was like the aim of the meeting was to both fill up time and to put a bandage over an issues that would fast present itself again, or play the blame game that it was someone else’s fault for not reaching a ‘target’.

This place wasn’t even a typical corporate or traditionally stuffy industry either, like finance, it was in advertising, a place that was seen as richly creative. It was just following the ‘tried and trusted’ orthodox structure that was carbon-copied throughout many institutions large and small at the time (and still today).

The problems became clearer.

Most of the time the limitations were discussed rather than the potential solutions. It was budget this or red tape that, instead of ‘let’s come up with a creative solution that doesn’t require a big budget but engages with the audience’.

I went home after that meeting feeling the opposite of how I felt the day before. I wasn’t excited about it anymore, I was actually dreading the next one. It felt like it was designed to squash ideas and solutions rather than present any new ones.

It didn’t take long to feel drained in the world of work and for your potential value to be diminished. Many know this feeling, and just accept it. My industry was meant to galvanize creative thinking though, so I was determined to figure out what I could do differently.

Figuring Out Why Group Brainstorm Sessions & Meetings Weren’t Working

I thought of ideas on how I could help engage the people a bit more. This wasn’t even my job ‘title’ at the time but I couldn’t resist. I envisioned the life being drained out of me if I didn’t.

It was hard not to. Some of the ideas that were being pushed forward for advertising campaigns (or even logos and slogans) were so stifling and red-taped from what I expected.

At home, I thought more about what could make this more engaging. How can we brainstorm in teams more effectively? I also had doubts. Was I just being naive and ill-prepared for the ways of work?

I tried not to let that pull me off track though.

I found myself researching both music and art therapy as successful studies pointed them towards helping those who were lost or depressed by heightening their creativity and wellbeing. I watch a few videos on brainstorming in teams without much information on the subject back then. I kept on pondering how teams could engage in such a serious environment (yes, even ad pitches can be stuffy).

It took a while but I kept coming back to the same conclusion I tried not to accept – people simply don’t brainstorm well together. There seemed to be enough research and evidence to support this, yet many continue to go about it the same way anyway.

I wanted to know why. Three findings came up:

1) We stick to our job role or expertise

We spend so much of our day repeating job roles and being known as ‘the guy or girl to go to for this or that’. It creates a divide in the workplace of having a small, but defined, set of skills. When people then walk into the meeting they are already prejudged (even unconsciously) as being the guy in IT or finance, or the girl in sales or human resources.

Whether we like to or not we tend to walk into a meeting armed with knowledge in our specific area and not open to seeing things or each other through a different perspective. We also feel we have to justify ourselves to our job role and speak with expertise rather than accept to learn from others.

2) We don’t allow time to adjust our minds to create together

There also seemed to be very little downtime for the creative mind to actually engage in creative mode. Productivity is linked to time and deadlines. People would be called in at specific times and work in very structured ways (to reach timescale targets).

This is even true in creative industries, which was a surprise to me at first. I guess it wasn’t the fluid environment I thought it might’ve been when I first started.

Of course, with other people around (and many clients to cater for) businesses would be run with an element of structure to ensure things get done. That’s all well and good for the account manager or the receptionist, that’s their job to keep structured. However, it is a creative block for actually finding solutions.

It’s surprising when considering just how important innovation and ‘creating’ is towards businesses to move forward, just how little the environment is adaptable to help that blossom.

Everything was set up perfectly for a top-down meeting of listing targets and following order, to speak a lot of drivel, getting nowhere but feeling like you had. It is set up for people to stick to their job role expertise, and it is set up to avoid collaboration that allows people to feel free to explore their creative minds to solve problems together.

3) The methods are usually the same

I realized that despite a mountain of ‘ice-breaker’ material that group brainstorming session tried to use to stimulate their workers to collaborate, often the breakdown of ideas proceeded the breakdown of communication, yet companies were treating it like communication breakdown was the most important factor stopping ideas.

It wasn’t. What seemed to me to be more impacting was the repetition of methods used. As well as sticking to our routines in job function, we seemed to stick to the same ‘trusted’ methods in group brainstorming. It was all very orthodox and trying the same thing, in the same room, often at the same time, with the same people, and expecting different results through trying to engage in better communication.

In short. It wasn’t working. Why?

Two Key Missing Ingredients To The Creative Process

From my research I found that there’s one fundamental truth being ignored – solutions don’t work on a timeframe or present themselves in routine.

Sure, deadlines help get people into action, and businesses do need schedules, but solutions require our minds to be flexible enough towards thinking of something different from the four walls around us.

We don’t need to go out of the four walls to be creative but we do need to look at the four walls in a different way and to develop a stimulus that ‘stimulates’ our imagination to create solutions.

The article on 5 ways to fire up creativity in the workplace helps explain this.

This just didn’t seem to be happening in those brainstorm sessions/meetings I first went to, and in many that followed.

Why?

Even if the meeting was meant to be a creative session where ideas could float around and people can add what they want without judgment, most still found it hard to conjure up ideas on the spot.

ENTER WHITESPACING

There’s evidence that has been found in more recent times that ‘procrastination can aid creativity‘ but we should be careful with misunderstanding that. When we say ‘procrastinate’ to create, it’s more likely referring to whitespacing (or the day-dream-like state where our minds are free to wander without constraint).

As an example, instead of seeing a table as a table, or a place to sit down and do work, we can see how we can shift this object into other potential uses.

What’s happening is we are simply activating our creative mode.

If we were to then attach a brief or focus point whilst in this mode we start seeing all sorts of solutions around our focus point that we didn’t see before when thinking logically.

This is a kind of background process though rather than a direct focus. The best ideas flow when our minds are free to wander in the background whilst getting on with other things.

Yet, we do need a focus topic or brief to ‘whitespace’ effectively. If we don’t then we would either fall into logical routines in auto-pilot and no whitespace processing would go on in the background (we would be in a passive state), or our creative wandering would simply just go around in circles. We may just come up with completely unordered wanderings and procrastinate from one thing to the next, without really ever getting anywhere.

Go here to learn more about the importance of whitespacing ideas.

I put this theory into practice in a small design intern workshop I was running at the same time to mentor and train new intern designers to think critically.

These people tended to have more fluid intelligence at the young age they were at anyway, but the experiment only really worked on one side but failed miserably on another.

What worked was the concept of whitespacing. The interns found they were able to formulate ideas much clearer when given the time to let them formulate without direct focus.

What I didn’t anticipate was how it was sometimes blocked when group interaction occurred. In other words, whitespacing is largely a day-dreaming-like state that is done better on our own, as interaction with other people could simply act as a distraction to the whitespacing.

This was a surprise to me as I thought I knew how we were often more creative when in groups. (EDIT: Later with Richly Wills I researched whether we are more creative alone vs creative in groups).

Of course, collaboration involves people so how can people effectively whitespace and then collaborate together?

I could easily just say, ‘they can’t’, end the articles here and move on, but it’s not strictly true.

ENTER CO-CREATION

The reason is co-creation, or trying to find the state of co-creation to be more precise.

The Story And Search For Answers Continues…

A couple of years later, when I decided to have a radical life change to go and travel and freelance my way around the world for a while, I started to hear this word (co-creation) being banded about (along with user experience).

There were only a few co-living or co-working hubs around at the time but I remember visiting Bali for a few weeks and finding a couple of hubs within Ubud that seemed to create a real flow amongst people there.

I got involved in them too and actually used it as a bit of an experiment for this ongoing research into how human behavior and innovation link up.

I created a completely bogus small, creative enterprise project that I had no intention to continue after. I could’ve continued it as a business in itself but I was deep into other endeavors at the time.

Where did the idea originate? When I traveled from Perth to Darwin on a road trip with a few others I remember buying a car in Perth with one of my fellow travelers only to sell it for more at the end of the trip in Darwin (with the difference paying for our fuel and food). Free 4 week trip!

We thought that was a great deal until we learned of another traveler who was simply ‘collecting’ a rental car in Darwin and then driving for free back to Perth. He was actually paid to do so (as the distancing in Australia was so vast that rental companies relied on travelers willing to travel quickly for a free trip to bring the car back to a hub that was more desirable).

I wondered whether the same kind of thing could work with musical instruments. I was wrong and possibly pretty naive. How could you possibly make money on buying an instrument in one place to sell in another in the same country?

Yet it did open up another idea. What if there were ‘music hubs’ where people could ‘rent’ an instrument as they traveled and drop it off at another destination as they pleased? We have it with city bikes everywhere now.

So, I used this idea to act as my enterprising startup and when I stayed in this co-living and working environment in Bali I found there were so many other digital nomads and travelers with their own small to medium business ideas.

I thought having so many people around you would just be a distraction at first for your own project. Surely you need to band together and work on the same idea? How can you possibly help each other work on each other’s ideas?

Yet it worked (why co-creation works). It was a creative juice factory in that it really helped people find the answers already within themselves.

They almost just needed permission to open up their creative mode and expand on it. It allowed people to engage in each other’s work which sparked solutions for their own, and which gave rise to whitespacing so people were still working creatively out of the ‘meetings’ even when they weren’t directly focused on something.

What if the same conditions of a co-working environment like in Bali could be replicated at work? How could people get into a whitespace of clarity and not be distracted by others with pressing demands?

I returned from my trip and tried to put both whitespacing and co-creation into practice, in tandem.

5 Unorthodox Methods To Help Team Brainstorming

Thinking back to the 3 main problems in group brainstorming, I realized I needed easier techniques to help myself, and others, resist the typical structure of group meetings (that weren’t getting the best out of its collaborators), and to find a way to integrate the two missing ingredients into the fray.

How can you both whitespace and co-create effectively in the confines of a typically time-structured business setup?

Thankfully, there are ways, but they are not the usual methods teams try at work. They are more unorthodox, and yet this is exactly what they need to be to bring out the flexible minds that are required in such a creativity demanding session on short notice.

You see, for all of your mind-mapping, round-robin, and step-ladder techniques, many of these are still quite ‘forced’. These can certainly help as ice-breakers but there’s a flaw in that even they are being controlled too much by time structure, focus too much on communication comfort over idea generation, and they often only promote random ideas without direction (if produce any ideas at all).

And for all your group brainstorming session that are treat like a conventional meeting with top-down meeting structures that expect results by setting up targets and deadlines, you find it simply keeps the best solutions at bay as they become stifled underneath the expectation of what you should be doing in your job role.

The actual creative process needs the opposite to get into a ‘focused flow’. The mindset has to be activated best for creative work to flow.

While changing our environment and brainstorming individually would be other useful methods to consider, it’s not always possible at work, so instead here are 5 useful and unorthodox techniques to use to bring out a successful group brainstorming session, whatever the time and environmental constraints.

Unorthadox Method 1

1) Hello Notebooks. Activate Whitespacing.

Individuals create more ideas than groups.

That’s a fact found in many studies. So, when we consider this it makes sense to allow the individuals in companies to shine at idea generation (divergent thinking) to then bring to the group later when more convergent thinking is needed.

If there’s two things any successful creative person will tell you to spark ideas it’s ‘not to let them go in the first place’ and ‘find a way to externalise them to make them imprinted on your mind’.

When we either write or read something out loud we find ways to take ideas into our neo-cortex where our logic can make sense of it. (This helps with ‘whitespacing’ in the background after too).

We can’t always just speak out all our ideas in the workplace though. It’s a bit weird and distracting. We can certainly find a way to write them down quickly though.

Having small notebooks at the ready is not only good for capturing ideas on the go as they arise, it also allows your brain an excuse to cut off from the auto-pilot routines we find ourselves in through our day.

We can then bring these notebooks to meetings and use them in other creative ways to help us activate our creative side much quicker when the meeting or brainstorming session starts.

Unorthadox Method 2

2) Set The Target Keyword Focus The Day Before

Why keywords? Why a day before?

Usually, when we go into a meeting or brainstorming session we immediately aim to switch on our minds there and then, or at least we try to.

It often only really engages near enough the time the session ends. The creative process requires us to think outside of the box more, and push beyond our current comfort levels, which takes some adapting, especially if we aren’t used to doing so.

Too late. If we want to be switched on for when we know we have a brainstorming session approaching the next day we actively want to ‘prep’ our minds in advance to switch on quicker when the time comes for the group brainstorming session.

The problem with only switching it on when we enter the session is that our logical processes will still be firing and our creativity will likely be control and stifled behind it.

We essentially need to switch our logic off to allow creativity to really flow. We can’t do that in most day jobs, but what we can do it activate our creative mind earlier so it is on auto-pilot itself in some ways.

When we do this the day before we go to bed with the thoughts in mind over what the brainstorming sessions topic will be about, and if we repeat the keywords of the sessions focus a day earlier, our mind will drift into sleep with them active.

We will then already be dreaming of all sorts of connotations with those keywords through the night and even if we wake up to do our logical work the next day, our mind will also trigger into those creative ideas much quicker subconsciously when we need to, as those ideas are simply floating in the background (‘whitespacing’).

Unorthadox Method 3

3) Let Many Ideas Flow First BEFORE Bringing Contraints In

Meetings or brainstorming sessions tend to start and end at a certain time. It rarely gives you the opportunity to get your juices flowing before it starts. It’s like 5 minutes from the task you were doing before and then straight into it. It’s also often at the start or end of the day when people are most tired.

It’s hard enough to switch on your creativity on-call like that when not used to, so dedicating some time at the start of a session to bring out our creativity and our ease in collaboration with others is very beneficial.

If you don’t do this you may think you are saving time, but you are effectively only wasting more as it would be less likely that people would have adequate solutions to problems as they are being discussed.

If everyone has their hamsters on their creative wheels then it sparks co-creation and synergy.

For a successful group brainstorm session, you may hear about initializing creative techniques such as mind-mapping, round-robins, and step-ladder techniques.

This is the ‘brief’ time to do so, but be aware that they only become effective if we have conducted the environment to activate our creative mind in the background prior to this stage. If we haven’t then it will likely take our creative mode longer to plug into.

However, these should remain as ice-breakers, stretches for our creative muscle to wake up, rather than whole session techniques.

Why?

We want to engage in creative mode as fast as possible, and not just produce random ideas without direction.

You will hear many people talk about how we shouldn’t have too many ideas in a brainstorming session or we won’t get things done, but this is usually because the whole session is spent trying to engage in creative mode through these techniques, and through collaboration or ‘hear me out’ mentalities rather than to focus our creative efforts on bringing about ideas that lead somewhere.

We should already be in that mode before we enter the brainstorming session.

This is similar to ice-breakers that work as refreshers or warmups in school. They should be kept fairly short to refresh and recap, and to bring people together in the same collaborative efforts.

That said, if idea generation is leading somewhere then don’t just stop because time said so.

A creative brainstorming session works when people are in the same co-creation mindset, not when people are just speaking over each other, so let it flow if it’s flowing.

When the environment becomes too fixed and limiting, or when we shut down an idea halfway, then we miss the best part of the solution process, which is this ‘flow’ – where solutions naturally form and shape before constraints are brought in.

The ‘flow’ is where our mind pushes past limitations and creates new personal bests, even if the challenge at the time feels hard. The results are often retrospective and delayed gratification, but they are the most rewarding too. (Learn more about how flow and optimal experience works)

If we limit this then state of flow then we will often have too few ideas to work with, not too many as is often worried about.

You see, our logic is often very good at shutting ideas down when we put constraints in place, so it’s fundamentally important to allow the start of a brainstorming session to bring the ‘whitespacing’ to the front and to let ideas flow.

When people are then warmed up bring in some constraints, and only then! Discuss the budgets, red tape, and so on.

If we went into a meeting with logic first we shut down our minds to open up solutions.

We need this ‘diamond thinking approach’ known as ‘green lighting’ to give our minds the flexibility to solve problems when hurdles are put in place.

Unorthadox Method 4

4) Don’t Discuss. Facilitate, Then Co-Create

What? Surely ideas come when we discuss them together.

No. They often do the opposite.

We can absolutely be creative together, but that tends to be the synergy stage of binding them into working solutions, rather than the initial idea generation stage that group brainstorming sessions tend to focus on.

So directly after the initial ice-breaker stage we actually need to find our own individual thinking space (or if not possible, then at least organize sessions around the to and fro of individual flow states and group collaboration).

So why think individually first? Why does ‘flow’ occurs better on our own?

When we discuss our idea with others they quickly become exposed to scrutiny, we become defensive in which ideas are good or not, we start doubting ourselves or other people’s ideas, we become loud in making our idea heard, we pretend to listen to other ideas when we are actually just waiting to tell our own, or we conform to the will of the group instead of actually think about the better solution.

It all becomes a bit like a playground, but it’s just not fun, it is more likely to lead to unmanaged arguments about what should be done, inevitably with the bosses coming in and making the final decision again, whether it’s the right one or not.

So, how can we have a brainstorming session without discussing?

We often forget what both brainstorming and co-creation actually mean. They don’t mean ‘we’ necessarily. They just mean create together, but you can do so more effectively when you are shouting over each other. You can do so even in separate work stations or even separate countries (now with Zoom).

This isn’t to say don’t discuss at all.

When one person comes up with an idea that sparks progressive creative thoughts from others, and if they are working through co-creation they will be on the same page working to a shared solution rather than trying to be the hero who has all the answers.

It works better though when we think of ideas separately first, even before the session begins if possible, and then to share and improve aspects of each idea together.

Creating ideas separately at first might sound a bit cold and isolating, but a whole session of just throwing ideas around a table will get you nowhere.

This is especially so if you aren’t in creative mode at the start of a session as you will give your mind no space to work things out. You will be too transfixed on coming up with an idea yourself rather than hearing and co-creating with other people’s.

Collaboration is important though.

There’s a point where people come back in together in the session or meeting, but only once you are in the same creative zone as other co-workers. Then you can feed off other people in the same zone. It’s getting people into that zone that counts first, which is why Method 1, 2, and 3 are important.

(This is also why Richly Wills advocates setting up 2-hour creative sessions rather than the usual one that is ‘left’ for solution resolution. In industries that aren’t used to being creative together, it often takes longer for people to warm up and to engage with their creativity, so the first hour can be useful for ice-breaking exercise, but ONLY if it includes the flow-based techniques within the two hours too).

Get Richly’s ‘The Creative Eye’ training program for step-by-step techniques and challenges in bringing out your creative potential.

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Once people are divergently co-creating together with empathy then they will find they are seeking to work towards the same solution, as creativity and synergy blossoms when we are able to co-create and strive towards the same solution together.

Then comes the time for the convergent part where we have to be even more sure that discussion doesn’t turn into personalized disagreements.

Unorthadox Method 5

5) Use Blind Votes To Move On When You Need To

This last one is possibly less unorthodox today.

Why? It works nicely alongside the typical logic usually carried out in workplaces, so people tend to naturally like doing this one.

The difference is that when we vote on the ideas or solutions that fit our target question or focus keyword we should not turn it into a popularity contest.

If there’s one major flaw with social media then it’s how it is essentially driving people into an identity group-led popularity contest where the end goal is to be a popular influencer rather than a competent one.

Therefore, to combat this, and to ensure people aren’t speaking over each other we have to devise the voting part of solution generating.

We present our idea AFTER flow focus and group co-creation (towards improving each other’s ideas) and then we each ‘blind vote’ on the ‘solutions’ that we best think solves the problem at hand.

When we use blind votes we don’t pick our friends, the boss doesn’t decide, our status or job role doesn’t matter, we pick the solution that fits the best.

This won’t be possible if everyone sees each other’s ideas all the time, which is why sessions also often involve enough alone time to get into your notebook and target questions, and to use the other techniques that bring ‘diamond thinking’ to the situation.

When it’s time to vote and move the session to the next stage then do so without judgment and swiftly.

When a decision is made then stick to it and take it forward to the prototyping or feedback stages, which again can use blind votes where necessary.

Voting should not be stifling the creative process but allow it to move on before paralysis analysis kicks in. We do not want to become too attached to our ideas.

We need to help each other move forward to the most workable solution after, which is the aim of following solution development sessions.

These are the suggested and effective group brainstorming methods to bring the key components of whitespacing and co-creation into your sessions, but feel free to experiment with them to suit your needs.

After all, that adaptability is key towards develop a more creative and effective solution.

Good luck in your next group brainstorming session. Let it be more effective than previous ones!