Be Less Zombie

21Preparing for Greatness

How to supercharge your team's creative prowess before anyone walks into the room.

Great creative sessions are often a function of what happened before anyone walked into the meeting room.

Sure, the process and mechanics of the brainstorm have a big impact on the quality of ideas that will emerge. But if your brainstorms need to pack a bigger creative punch, there's a little bit of groundwork that it's worth considering in advance.

There are some key ingredients that you can adjust according to the outcome though, many of which relate to the kind of question that you're aiming to answer. The more complex or ambiguous the question, the more likely you'll need to mix up the approach.

1. Social Dynamics

I regularly ask people who have attended brainstorms what they feel distinguishes the great from the gruesome. There's a long list of answers but at the heart of them all is one single problem: people.

© Elvin Turner.

Loudmouths, naysayers, the shame of suggesting something ‘stupid’, speed of the brainstorm process regardless of thinking style, social pressure to spontaneously give birth to genius… These are just a few of the creative constipators that fight against great ideas in most brainstorms.

So how do we re-engineer the process so that we don't get in the way of ourselves?

Separated at Birth There's one simple thing that you can do to radically ...