handbooksGenerating ideas
Group brainstorming produces fewer and worse ideas than the same people working alone. The alternating method that fixes it, and how to narrow a wall of ideas down to a few worth testing.
- Quantity predicts quality. Your first ideas are rarely your best, and the good ones show up after the obvious ones are out of your head.
- Classic group brainstorming underperforms. People working alone, then sharing, produce more ideas and more varied ones.
- Alternate: generate alone, share as a group, generate alone again. More than one round.
- Narrow with dot voting, then require an advocate for each surviving idea. Ideally different people advocating for different ones.
Why your first idea is suspect
The moment a problem becomes clear, a solution arrives with it. That solution feels obvious, which is exactly the reason to distrust it: it is the one available to anyone who thought about the problem for ten seconds, including your competitors.
Creative teams know that quantity is the best predictor of quality. Not because volume is impressive, but because the early ideas clear out the conventional ones and make room for the ones worth having.
The trouble with brainstorming in a room
Group brainstorming has a good reputation and a poor record. Put the same people in a room together instead of working separately and the group produces fewer ideas, and less varied ones. Three reasons:
| Effect | What happens |
|---|---|
| Social loafing | Effort drops when it is shared. Nobody notices you thought a little less hard |
| Conformity | Once two ideas point the same direction, the third one follows. Odd ideas get self-censored before anyone says them |
| Production blocking | Only one person talks at a time. While you wait your turn, you rehearse instead of generating, and forget the rest |
There is also the illusion of group productivity: teams rate collaborative sessions as more productive than solo work even when measurement shows the opposite. The session feels good. The output is thinner.
The method that works
Alternate between working alone and sharing as a group. You get the variety of individual thought and the building-on-each-other of group work, without the group suppressing the individual.
- Review the target opportunity. Everyone works against the same specific need. Not the outcome, not a theme. One opportunity.
- Generate alone. Fifteen minutes, no talking, quantity over polish. Aim for more ideas than feel reasonable.
- Share across the team. Everyone puts their ideas up and walks through them. No evaluating yet.
- Generate alone again. This round is where the good ones appear, because you are now building on what you heard.
- Repeat if the space is still thin.
Competitors, adjacent products, and analogous products in unrelated industries. How does a hotel handle the equivalent problem? A hospital? The point of looking sideways is that you will never stumble on the unexpected while staying inside the familiar.
Give yourself permission to be unreasonable
The magic wand prompt is worth using: if you could do anything, with no technical or business limits, what would you do? Impossible ideas are useful raw material. The realistic version of a wild idea is often better than anything on the sensible list, and you do not get there by starting sensible.
Narrowing down
You now have a wall of ideas and need a few. Two steps.
1. Dot voting
Everyone gets a small number of dots and places them on the ideas they think best address the opportunity. This is fast, it surfaces where energy actually is, and it avoids the meeting where the most senior voice sets the direction in the first two minutes.
Dot voting narrows. It does not decide.
2. Require an advocate
Each surviving idea needs at least one person on the team willing to argue for it. Ideally different people advocate for different ideas.
This does more work than it looks. It forces the reasoning into the open, it stops a compromise choice nobody actually believes in, and it sets up a genuine comparison rather than a consensus slide toward the safest option.
Working with a set of ideas rather than one favorite is the whole discipline. The moment you have a single candidate, everything that follows becomes an attempt to justify it, and evidence against it starts looking like a problem with the test.
Evaluating what survives
For each remaining idea, ask:
- Does it actually address the target opportunity, or a different one you like better?
- Is it feasible with what we have, or near enough to test cheaply?
- Would it plausibly move the outcome at the top of the tree?
- Does it fit where the business is going?
Then carry the two or three strongest forward, each with its own advocate. Do not crown a winner here. The front-runner should emerge from comparing what the assumption tests come back with, which is the next two pages of work, not from a vote at the end of an ideation session.
Anti-patterns
- The same perspectives every time. A trio of people with similar backgrounds converges quickly on similar ideas.
- Twenty variations of one idea. Different button placements are one idea with adjustments, not twenty options.
- One session, ever. The best ideas usually arrive in the second or third round, after the obvious ones are cleared out.
- Evaluating while generating. Judging early kills the odd ideas first, and the odd ideas are the reason for doing this.
Count the ideas your team generated for its current work. If it is fewer than ten, you did not ideate, you agreed on the first plausible thing.