5 Steps to Turning Your Brainstorm into a Creative Armageddon
Participating in brainstorms is an almost daily practice here at Attention. While client work is always first and foremost in our minds, brainstorms are a hugely important part of the creative process. Here are 5 ways to get the most out of your brainstorming sessions:
1. Know your objective.
Nine times out of ten the people participating in your brainstorm have no relationship with your client or potential new business. This shouldn’t matter. As long as you know your client’s objective and can successfully relay that to the group then really no other information is needed. Key players, budgets, timelines, etc are all great to have but shouldn’t be the focus of your brainstorm. The point is to get thoughtful ideas, not give a history lesson.
2. No idea is a bad idea.
Create an environment that fosters out-of-the box thinking. There is nothing worse than attending someone else’s brainstorm and offering an idea just to be met with a shrug or an, “eh, maybe.” It encourages not only the person who offered an idea to disengage from the conversation, but also instills trepidation in other group members to participate. The best ideas often spring from a deep well of bad ones.
3. Keep the conversation going.
A brainstorm’s worst enemy – Silence. Avoid awkward pauses and lulls in group thinking sessions. As the host of the brainstorm, your job is not to present the objectives and then sit back and let everyone else do the work for you. Don’t come to the table empty handed. This is the time to bring all your ideas – creative, boring, highly unrealistic, frighteningly realistic – to the team. Pauses kill the momentum of a creative train; fill the space with competitor examples, key learnings from past campaigns, ANYTHING.
4. Live in “Brainstorm mode”.
The most creative people live in “brainstorm mode”. You do your clients a disservice when you don’t allow yourself the time to read blogs, magazines, newspapers, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, etc. How can you be creative for them if you can’t be creative for yourself? For example, I don’t work in fashion or music but I follow a ridiculous amount of fashion and music magazines on Facebook and find insane amounts of inspiration to apply to an entirely different vertical. Bring this inspiration to your brainstorms – be a thoughtstarter and you’ll become a thoughtleader.
5. You have to give to receive.
You want ideas? Give others ideas. Again, it’s easy to get bogged down in your own client work, but there is such invaluable knowledge, inspiration, and camaraderie that exists in participating in brainstorms outside of your vertical. Listen to your colleagues as they describe their objectives. See how their thought processes work. Then go back to your brand and approach it as a stranger.
Brainstorms can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Come prepared to present, engage, inspire, and most importantly, participate.
In a perfect world, the acts of gaining and sharing knowledge would be enough to draw participants to your brainstorm, but let’s face it, time is precious – so bring food.
