On a bus ride, walking down the street, reading a book at home, in the shower, or anywhere else, really clever ideas come to us. We aren’t looking for them, but the pattern-recognizing, question-asking machine that is your mind creates them.
We weren’t focused on having them, and yet after a few thoughts and questions, they show up.
There’s some research behind this. Stepping away from a problem and letting your mind wander for a while, what psychologists call incubation, has been shown to help people come up with more creative solutions when they come back to it. And a Stanford study found that walking boosts creative idea generation, with the effect lingering for a while after people sat back down. It helps us explore new ideas, connect ideas we hadn’t related before, and solve problems creatively.
However, there are times when we need the ideas to come before we go out looking for them. That’s when we set up a brainstorming session.
A session where we generate ideas, discuss them, evaluate them, and finally decide which ones are best. The term itself comes from Alex Osborn, an advertising executive who popularized the technique in the 1940s and 1950s. Several of the tips below echo his original rules.
In this post I’ll share some tips for more effective brainstorming:
Don’t stop at the second idea
Maybe with the first or second concept that comes to mind, you’ll feel like you’ve found the right solution. But you might be close to something better. Keep imagining!
If you stick with the first idea, you might miss the chance to discover something better. Research on divergent thinking backs this up: in idea-generation tasks, ideas tend to get more creative the longer people keep going, because the first ones are usually the most obvious.
Multiply the number of ideas
It’s about having as many ideas as possible. Even if they barely differ from one another. Even better if they’re small ideas.
You can develop each of them in more detail later.
It gives you better odds of finding good ideas, especially if they’re small ideas, with small concepts rather than in-depth descriptions. This was one of Osborn’s core rules: go for quantity.
Hold off on discarding ideas
Don’t judge ideas during the brainstorming stage either. Let the creation happen.
If a strange idea comes to mind, write it down, even if at first it seems far-fetched.
Because every idea can be unique, that idea can lead to one that is realistic.
One note if you’re brainstorming as a group: classic research found that people working alone, and then pooling their ideas, often come up with more ideas than the same people brainstorming out loud together. A big reason is that in a group, only one person can talk at a time, and the rest are waiting their turn and forgetting what they were going to say. So it’s worth giving everyone some quiet time to write ideas on their own first, like in the nominal group technique, and then share them.
Concrete ideas > Fuzzy ideas
Ideas should also communicate what’s essential. Concrete ideas, not fuzzy or ambiguous ones. One or two sentences are enough.
If your idea can’t be explained in a few words, you’re probably not being concrete enough.
Visualize the idea
Picturing the idea can be a great help too. For example, the flow a user would follow through an app. Draw it in boxes, as a quick concept map, or as a rough interface sketch (wireframe) that captures the idea.
Something as simple as this already says a lot more than a paragraph:
flowchart LR
A[Open the app] --> B[Take a photo of the receipt]
B --> C[App reads the total]
C --> D{Split with friends?}
D -- Yes --> E[Pick friends]
E --> F[Send each one their share]
D -- No --> G[Save to expenses]
This also helps you find better ways to work with ideas.
Store your ideas in a safe place
We can’t always trust our memory.
It’s important to have a place to store all your ideas so they don’t get lost. It gives them a place where they can be evaluated and developed later. Use a notes app, a spreadsheet, a sheet of paper, etc.
Conclusion
Applying these tips can help you generate more and better ideas, efficiently and effectively. Keep in mind that generating ideas means using your imagination and thinking outside the box.
My name is Marcelo, thank you so much for reading.