This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here.
When we first had the idea to focus on meetings, I wasn’t going to write about brainstorms. It felt like something that was already well-covered in countless blogs, podcasts and videos – some great, some eminently forgettable.
But creative meetings – whether you call them brainstorms or not – are a key part of the industry. Whether they happen with a client or within the team, floating, testing and sharpening ideas needs to happen in some format.
And it turns out it’s something a tonne of designers have very strong opinions on. And so here are five creatives with five different ideas about brainstorming better…
Brian Collins – Just say no
Brainstorming is what happens when people who have never had an idea try to simulate the appearance of having one. It’s a séance for the unimaginative, complete with bad office snacks.
No-one I know with real talent has ever, ever, ever requested a brainstorming session. Why? They already have ideas. Too many.
No, no, no. Talented people do not brainstorm. Talented people brood. They sulk. They take long walks and think. They lie awake at night with a crushing sense of impending failure and wake up with ten better ideas than yours.
And they show you. And you build on them. What they do not do is gather around a sad whiteboard as if divine inspiration is lurking in the fluorescent lighting.
A brainstorm session is a padded cell for corporate dullards who want the thrill of “creativity” without the burden of actually being creative. These people don’t want ideas – they want to be seen near ideas, like tourists posing in front of ruins they’re helping to destroy.
The room is always the same: a preening, dead-eyed facilitator and 12 poorly dressed people with Sharpies hoping someone else will say something first so they don’t have to.
What follows is an avalanche of inoffensive garbage: slogans that sound like rejected insurance commercials, metaphors involving bridges and climbing and journeys and belonging, and the inevitable appearance of someone who says, “Let’s circle back!” or “Let’s all re-group!” with the conviction of a war criminal.
Brainstorming doesn’t generate ideas – it produces landfill. It’s the intellectual equivalent of dumping out everyone’s junk drawers and pretending it’s the Musée d’Orsay.
Brainstorming is cowardice disguised as collaboration. No-one risks anything, no-one thinks deeply, and no-one ever leaves with an idea worth remembering.
But everyone claps. They clap for the blandest suggestion. They clap for showing up. They clap because clapping is easier than saying, “This was a fucking waste of time and I now wish I’d lied about having to be out of town.”
But it’s not too late. Because you now realise this is where your ambition, imagination and hope will surely die, strangled by consensus, Post-It notes, cold coffee, and people who still use the word “ideate.” Run. While you can.
Brian Collins is founder and chief creative office of Collins, and president of the ADC.
Joel Stein – Think about the set and the setting
I think if you say the word brainstorms, a lot of people just have an immediate allergic reaction to it. I’ve been in enough bad ones to understand why that is.
Brainstorms are disastrous for all sorts of reasons. They are not good for introverts. The most senior people naturally dominate the session. But there’s also not really time and space for people to think even a few steps beyond the most obvious things that come into their heads.
Everyone feels the pressure to say something that’s not completely stupid, so people default to saying stuff that isn’t going to get them laughed out of the room.
I’m not saying brainstorms never yield anything decent or interesting. But they certainly put a lot of barriers in the way to getting good results.
Facilitation as a skill just doesn’t get talked about that much. It’s not really understood or respected.
If I ever ran an agency, I’d probably have a chief facilitator role. Not just someone who is quite senior, or happy to stand in front of a room, but someone that’s actually in the weeds of group dynamics and understands techniques to help people think more effectively as a group.
The space matters a lot. Not just where it is, but how it’s decorated and organised. You can’t expect people to go into a really grey boardroom, with traffic beeping in the background, and for everyone to be able to think brilliant thoughts.
With my new programme Ideas On Acid, I am thinking about creativity using the model of a healthy and therapeutic psychedelic trip. The key concepts with that are set and setting.
The mindset that you bring to the experience is going to massively shape the experience you have with these very powerful substances. And so is where you do it – you’ll have a very different time in the woods as opposed to in a dingy basement.
Leaders need to think about the atmosphere as much as the plan, or the exercises. The vibe is almost always the most important thing.
Joel Stein is a copywriter and creative consultant.
Cat How – Booze unlocks brilliance
My creative director Chris Clayton agree on the fact that we come up with our best schemes, ideas, and breakthroughs in the pub together.
We make sure to have at least one session at the Barley Mow in Shoreditch whenever I’m back in London from LA. The magic happens normally after about eight pints of Timothy Taylor for him, and the equivalent in glasses of rosé for me.
I think it just makes you think bigger, braver, more silly, and you just say, why not? I always like to parrot an Ernest Hemingway quote – “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
But I forget the second line, as I’m not one to keep my mouth shut. And I lead with the first and apply that to the ideas me, Chris, and my co-founder Rog have when we’re in the boozer getting merry.
Sometimes they’re off-hand reflections about the studio, and we decide to change things up a bit, Or perhaps there’s an idea for a piece of work or a client we’d like to collaborate with – and we think a little more around the box on that.
I have to remind myself to add these all to my Apple Notes while staggering back onto the Tube, as often a lot of this gold is lost the next morning.
When it comes to within the studio, we encourage a bottle of beer in a brainstorming session or in meetings towards the end of the day. Our 1-2-1s too, we ask if folks want to go to, er, the Barley Mow again to have a chat. We find people open up more about their thoughts, dreams and aspirations.
Cat How is co-founder of How&How.
Ben Mottershead – Play puts everyone on a level
I think what happens in most creative meetings is that the loudest voice takes over, and you become reliant on that loud voice being right on every occasion.
I have found the most creative people tend to be active listeners, and so a little quieter.
We like to gamify these sorts of meetings. Getting out plasticine, or LEGO, and asking people to create something makes brainstorming more of a collaboration. If this brand had a mascot, what would it look like? What would change in this person’s life if they got really drunk at the pub?
It’s true that not everyone gets it straight away. There are definitely people who start off slouched back with their arms crossed; a very defensive posture. But I’m a big believer that everyone’s a kid at heart, and after a while, everyone gets really into it. It’s about giving people that freedom to play, and that permission.
These things spark very different conversations, and, crucially, you don’t have to be good at speaking to contribute. You put everyone on an equal footing, whether they are a seasoned strategist or a junior who’s brand new to the industry.
Seniority is a problem. I have met some fucking useless ECDs – people who’ve stayed at the same place for a long time and have learned how to play the politics.
But we’ve had juniors – and interns – who have a much more interesting approach to design because they haven’t yet been moulded by the commercialism that comes with working in the industry.
Ben Mottershead is founder and creative director of Never Dull Studio.
Matt Ballantine – Embrace the power of random
About ten years ago, I became interested in the use of play. Especially working in quite serious sectors, I noticed that an absence of people feeling playful often seems to correlate with an inability to come up with anything other than how they’ve always done things.
I think a lot of it then comes down to our preconceptions of what creativity is. I think people in the creative industries are a lot less creative than they’d like to make out. And people outside of the field think that’s something that other people do.
I work a lot in software consulting, where people want to be professional. And to be professional means to be really fucking boring. It’s like the Protestant work ethic – you can’t possibly be working hard if it’s enjoyable.
I discovered that randomisation could be a really interesting way to break patterns of thinking.
One of the analyses of the world around us is that it’s essentially just a series of random events that are going on at varying levels of predictability. If it’s a toss of a coin, it’s very predictable. If I put money on the stock market, it’s completely unpredictable.
I came across apophenia, which is the ability to spot patterns within random information.
It’s a very human thing. During lockdown, I started a project where I posted a picture of my cup of coffee every day, and asked people what they saw. An AI would tell you that it was coffee, or maybe a cup. People tell you that it looks like a leopard chasing an elephant.
Sometimes I use random photographs as a spur to help people come up with new ideas. We also built something called The Creativator. People put ideas on cards, and these get put into this thing that looks like a fruit machine. It’s designed to see what happens when random ideas get put together.
In the last few years I invented our tarot deck. Not because I believe in tarot, but because it’s a randomisation thing.
There’s stuff people will know from traditional tarot decks, like Death, but also character cards like the Business Planner, or the Sales Person. What would disaster look like for this person?
The idea is to build empathy, and break people out of conventional ways of thinking. I designed these purposefully to be this weird artefact that doesn’t feel like it belongs in the business world.
Matt Ballantine is a sociologist and engagement manager at Equal Experts.