Running Playfully Productive Brainstorms

Flagrant has been experimenting with spending our internal time / non-client facing time in building meaningful things. Everything from our new Shop page to our Bookshop are artifacts of the team coming together to create our own work. We want to continue creating but when the team is faced with “Ok what can we build next?,” we’re left scratching our heads looking at looming, blank canvases:

We decided a brainstorming session would be fruitful (or at least act as a springboard) to generate ideas. If you’re anything like me though, having to come up with ideas on the spot in front of a bunch of people is a hard no thank you.

Instead, thoughtful exercises and accessible practices were incorporated to create a mindful brainstorming space for everybody on the team.

Avoid groupthink

In a world that favors extroverts and the outspoken, it’s important to make space for individual thoughts and for the quieter people who do their best work independently. I set up individual workspaces in a shared FigJam so everyone was working concurrently but independently.

Define the problem first

As a group of largely developers and designers, we’re accustomed to solving complex problems and great solutions come out of well-defined problems. Each team member shared a problem(s) they encountered recently at work. It didn’t matter how complicated or simple the problem was, just that they outline their problem statement with the following template:

Get out of your own head

Let’s be real, solving somebody else’s problem is much easier than solving your own. When it came to solutioning, I instructed everyone to choose a problem that wasn’t their own. For people who don’t normally ask for help, this opens up new perspectives from others (including people who don’t work on the same client project).

Timeblock

Spending hours, days, months trying to think of The Next Best Idea™️ tends to lead nowhere and is also, real exhausting. Every moment of this session was timeblocked to ensure people took action rather than sitting around and mulling. It’s a lesson in trusting instinct while also allowing for mistakes.

Quantity over quality

A former design professor of mine expressed, “If I ask for three drafts, I’ll maybe get one good idea in there to talk about. If I ask for twenty, then maybe I’ll get 3–4 good ideas in there and now we’ve got things to work with.” This mindset has stayed with me for years and repetition is shown to be a huge factor in making progress and pushing past limits.

We did Crazy 8’s—a design sprint activity from Google Ventures—as a way to embolden the team to generate distinct ideas and at the same time, stretch themselves beyond initial, safe solutions.

Go analog

While most of this session was online and digital, I encouraged the team to use pen and paper (1) because drawing digitally is Damn Hard™️ but also because (2) most of our work time is on a computer. Going back to the basics can jog the brain in different ways than we’re used to.

Embrace play

You know who always be judging me the hardest? Me.

I emphasized to the team before and during the brainstorming session that nothing they could say was too mundane, too stupid, too *gestures vaguely* whatever. Especially regarding their own thoughts. Self-censorship plagues many of us. Letting loose allows for silliness and play to run rampant and inspire everyone around us to remember to have fun and be creative (including ourselves).

Closing time

If you find this framework to be helpful, you can download our brainstorming template here for your own use.

This brainstorm session reflects much of what we do here at Flagrant too! We do these activities with our clients, during sprints, or simply when we get stuck in the rut. They’re great tools for software problems and we’ve seen these processes help bring value to our clients and to unlearn what’s expected to deliver the unexpected. Want some help running brainstorming sessions? You know where to find us!

If you’re looking for a team to help you discover the right thing to build and help you build it, get in touch.