In my last blog post I addressed how to prepare your team for a unique experience and have them primed and ready for brainstorming.
Now I want to cover what actually happens INSIDE the brainstorming session itself. What activities should be included? How do you keep the energy up throughout the session?
Here’s a detailed brainstorming framework and agenda you can follow to generate real results. It works whether you have 90 minutes or a full day; whether you are tackling product innovation, process improvement, strategic planning, or problem solving; and whether you have 4 people on the team or 12 (try not to do more than that). Feel free to pick and choose what you like and adjust to fit your team and desired depth.
Pre-Session Checklist
- Room Setup: Seating arranged to encourage collaboration (avoid traditional conference setups), background music playing softly, be free to move around. Being offsite is best!
- Materials: Whiteboards, sticky notes, markers, small and large paper pads, dot stickers for voting, projector/screen.
- Helpers: Enlist volunteers to capture ideas, manage breakout groups, and tally votes. Ensure they know their roles ahead of time.
- Technology: If you’re using digital tools, screen sharing, or virtual whiteboards, test everything before the team arrives.
- Breaks: Make sure you plan for breaks. People need mental and physical break periods.
- Food: Have snacks and beverages ready. If you have a session over 3 hours, plan lunch and/or supper.
1. Welcome the Team (5-20 minutes)
As people arrive, keep things light to set the tone. Try to keep a casual conversation going, laughs are ideal! This isn’t another meeting, it’s a space for creative thinking.
If anyone participated in personal disruptions ahead of the meeting, (with no pressure) see if they’ll share. As the facilitator, have your own ready to share and also explain the room disruptions you’ve set up.
2. Mental Warmups (5-20 minutes)
The personal disruptions mentioned in my other post are meant to break people out of their mental ruts. This period of warm up is meant to achieve the same thing.
Many facilitators do this with ice breakers. I personally don’t like them and have had better luck with other approaches. Consider sharing some optical illusions or brain teasers that stretch their minds rather than putting them on the spot with forced socialization.
That said, ice breakers that get people up and building something together can work too, if you have one you like. Things like small teams building the tallest tower out of toothpicks and mini-marshmallows is a common one that works well.
3. Cover the Brainstorming Ground Rules (2-10 minutes)
- No Bad Ideas: Save negativity for later. Right now, we’re generating not judging.
- Quantity Over Quality: More ideas mean more chances for success. Aim for volume.
- Wild Ideas Welcome: Suspend reality temporarily. One impossible idea can spark a feasible one.
- No Ownership Battles: Ideas belong to the team. Collaboration beats competition.
- Build on Others: Use “Yes, and…” thinking. Evolve, merge, and improve ideas together.
- Stay Present: No emails, no phones. Even during breaks, don’t get distracted.
These rules should be available throughout the session. Consider hanging a poster with them or sharing an attendee packet that includes it. If anyone is attending remotely, share these in the chat area.
As the facilitator, you should be prepared to enforce these rules!
4. Frame the Challenge (5-20 minutes)
Why are we here today? What’s the goal of this brainstorming session? What do we hope to achieve after spending hours together?
This is a critical time to ensure everyone’s head is in the right place before diving into the actual brainstorming. We’re not here just to have fun, we’re here to solve a business problem. Use whatever information you have to enlighten the team on current state, desired state, competition, business data, customer feedback…whatever you have.
Now that we have everyone mentally prepared, consider a short break after this.
5.A. Individual Ideation (5-15 minutes)
This time is well spent whether you had your team generate ideas ahead of time or not. Even if you asked them to, you cannot expect everyone to have devoted time to think about your business objective ahead of time. You will end up with more diverse ideas if you keep this individual time in the agenda.
Here, we want to provide your attendees with paper, pens, and/or sticky notes, and set a timer. Remind them that quantity of ideas is the goal.
Ask the team on their own to come up with 10+ ideas in 5 minutes. They can compete to see who comes up with the most. Keep some soft background music playing (instrumental music). Consider dropping a “crazy bomb of an idea” as an example… something completely unrealistic and surprising, just to jar their minds one last time before they start. Show them that it’s OK to be wild in their suggestions.
When the round is done, optionally, you can take the next 5-10 minutes hearing some of the team’s favorites. Not all, just the favorites. Write them on a board, or post the sticky notes up.
5.B. Second Round of Individual Ideation (10-20 minutes)
If you have time, do a second round of individual idea creation, but this time introduce lateral thinking. Using random entry to show them that ideas can be triggered through associations. Have snippets of paper with random words for each person to draw from a bowl or hat. Give them an additional 5 or 10 minutes to come up with another set of ideas that relates to the word they selected.
For this second round you should be prepared to help anyone who struggles. You can suggest connections to their selected word, or push them to explore synonyms, antonyms, or other associations. For instance, if they draw “tiger”, you can associate animal, cat, jungle, teeth, claws, stripes, fur, orange, black, white, predator, aggression, primal, mascot, camouflage, frosted flakes, breakfast, sports, Detroit, baseball, Cincinnati, football, apparel, clothing, costume, Halloween, and more!
The associations are endless. They draw “tiger”, associate “stripe”, and relate that to the objective in how “striping” could mean updating parts of a system, and not all of it. Or they associate “baseball” and relate that to the objective in how a “bunt” is a strategic move that averts expectations and gets you on base.
6. Idea Sharing (10-60 minutes)
This portion of brainstorming is where ideas start to come together. When people start sharing their initial ideas, others get inspired. Remind everyone that we’re not after ownership, we’re collectively trying to solve the business problem. Your helpers can take notes on who was involved in an idea, so they can later be tagged for additional input or the project team.
This step can be nerve-wracking. Professionals may be uncertain about sharing half-baked ideas, but this is what we need! Don’t pressure anyone, so you, as the facilitator, can offer to share ideas on their behalf if they would like that.
As part of this step, begin identifying patterns and themes. People’s first ideas are generally the easy ones that multiple people will have (including your competitors). There will be similarities. Group those ideas now and try to give the groupings easy to reference names.
The bulk of the ideas are now in everyone’s heads, consider a short break after this.
7. Idea Expansion (20-60 minutes)
As the team comes back from a break, do a round of dot voting. Your ideas are pasted up and grouped, and the team has had some time to let those ideas settle in their minds. Now we’re ready to start driving the focus of the rest of this session.
There should be a set of concepts that are most intriguing to the team. Now, you will encourage pushing some further, spin-off ideas, and cross-pollination. Even flipping ideas to their opposite is still welcome. SCAMPER is an acronym that applies to creative thinking, and you might print it out and display it for your session today.
Like comedy improv, we still do not want to be negative about any idea. Use “yes, and…” to elaborate on someone’s idea. “I really like this idea, now imagine if we spin it as…” Make sure these expansions are being written down and captured.
8. Wild Card Rounds (10-60 minutes)
If you have a larger group, this time is ideal for break-out sessions. If your group is small, it can be another individual ideation round.
Take the top contending themes and divvy them out to groups or individuals. Then you can run 1-3 speed rounds, rotating themes between rounds.
- Role Play: Ask them to expand on their theme as if they were Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezzos, Einstein, your competitor, or SpongeBob. This makes them think differently.
- Constraints: Consider how they would have to change the idea if they were limited by budget, time, quality, or approach. Poetry is beautiful because of its constraints.
- Wishful Thinking: What could you do if all constraints were lifted? If you were writing a fictional book, how would you make this happen?
- Exaggeration: Take the idea to the extreme. If the idea as stated is 10%, what does 100% look like? What does 10-times look like?
This level of pushing creativity can be exhausting, consider a break after this.
9. Bring it Together (10-60 minutes)
Update your board with the latest ideas and iterations, if you haven’t already. Give the attendees a few minutes to peruse the posted ideas and reflect. Refresh the favorites list with another round of dot voting.
If time allows, move on from all this divergent thinking, and ask the attendees to list some constraints or areas that need to be investigated for these favorite ideas to work. Keep in mind this is still a “no bad ideas” session, so this effort should be a means to identify next steps for the idea and how to ensure it is successful if it is selected to move forward.
If you still have more time available, start some discussion that could help create a priority matrix after the meeting (like How/Now/Wow). Venture into identifying the following for each of the favorite ideas. We’re just looking for broad strokes and wide ranges today. On a scale of 1-10, where do these fall?
- Impact: How much would this change the story for the business?
- Effort: How much effort from business resources might be required?
- Timeline: What would the timeline look like?
- Cost: Would there be outside costs?
10. Next Steps (5-10 minutes)
This is the last step of this brainstorming session, but this is not the end. Now we fill the team in on what happens next and give them confidence that today’s effort will be useful. Start by asking the team what excited or surprised them the most today, and what they’d like to do again sometime.
Explain to the team how these ideas will be documented and shared out. The team should already be excited about at least one of today’s ideas, they’ll sleep on these ideas and continue thinking. So, let them know that there will be an opportunity to add additional thoughts to their favorites in the days/weeks to come.
Explain if you have any further plans to get feedback from stakeholders, leaders, or customers. If there are decision makers that are not in this meeting, then help your team understand what you’ll be doing to share these collective ideas with those who will make the final call.
Lastly, thank them for their time today. Express your own satisfaction and excitement for what’s to come. Try to squeeze in a few more laughs and build a feeling of teamwork. Consider remarking on something from this meeting as a “you had to be there” type of joke, even if it is the unrealistic bombshell of an idea that gets a laugh.
Tips for the Facilitator
- Energy Management: Watch the room’s energy. If it dips, inject movement. Stand up, stretch, take a quick walk, change the pace with a speed round.
- Protect the Quiet Voices: Don’t let extroverts dominate. Use techniques like written brainstorming and round-robin sharing to ensure everyone contributes.
- Embrace the Awkward Silence: When you ask a question and get silence, resist the urge to fill it. Give people time to think. Count to ten in your head before jumping in, and don’t make them feel like it was a failure to not say anything.
- Document Everything: Assign helpers to photograph whiteboards, capture sticky notes, and record key insights. You’ll lose valuable ideas if you rely on memory alone.
- Keep Your “Crazy Idea Bomb” Ready: If the room gets stuck, be prepared to throw out something intentionally wild to break the pattern. Sometimes the group needs permission to think bigger.
- Stay Neutral: As facilitator, your job is to guide the process, not advocate for specific ideas. You can participate, if you want to, but save your own advocacy for later. No idea is a bad idea in this session.
Conclusion
I hope you find this example brainstorming session agenda helpful! It’s one of my favorite things to run through. Get your team prepped and ready, then deliver an amazing workshop to drive creativity and innovation!
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