Creative Brainstorming

I was in Chicago with the Creative Leadership Team a few weeks ago, and as part of the evening festivities we took them to The Second City for a little comedy.  As part of the routine the comedy group did an improv exercise they called Freeze. 

Here is how Freeze works:  Two comedians get up and start to improvise a scene.  At any moment, any other comedian can yell ’freeze’ and s/he then gets up and taps one of the original two on the shoulder and replaces them.  From there, the new comedian continues the story with the one comedian remaining.  The routine moves quickly, it’s funny as hell and it is great to see all the creative minds at work.

Fast-forward to the next morning.  I woke up with a mean hangover (it must have been those ’special’ margaritas from the Mexican restaurant) and was getting ready to put the finishing touches on a brainstorming session I was going to lead the creative leadership team through.  After popping two Excedrin and giving my temples a rub, it hit me - The Freeze would work perfectly as the backbone for my brainstorming session!  I scrapped my plans (which included some of my earlier thoughts on brainstorming)  and went with my gut.  The brainstorming topic was innovation, so why not walk the walk.

Here is how I structured the brainstorming:

• Two people got up to talk about creative innovation in the workplace.  It was encouraged for them to be in character…this loosens people up and gets the ideas flowing better.  Laughter is amazing that way.

• Anyone could yell freeze, take the place of one person, and start sharing their ideas through the performance.  You might need to facilitate even participation from the entire group.

• If someone wanted to join in the conversation and not ‘tag’ someone out, that was fine.  We had 4 people up on stage at one point.

• Instead of having a designated note taker, which I normally do, I had everyone take notes.  Because people were in character and often speaking through analogies, there were different takes on a single comment.

• After 15 minutes of ‘Freeze Brainstorming’, I broke everyone into pairs and had them work on expanding the ideas presented, as well as any new thoughts that came out of further discussion.  Try pairing opposites together as much as possible - it yields better results more often than not. 

• The pairs worked for 30 minutes.

• Everyone came back together, and each pair presented their ideas.  All ideas were put up on the board.

• There was open discussion about the ideas and a solid set of next steps were developed.

Overall, the brainstorming session was a great success.  The ideas were plentiful and very strong, and the attitude in the room was upbeat and fun - which is uber-important when in these settings.  With all that said, when I conduct another Freeze Brainstorming, I will experiment with a few things:

• Adding more structure to the on-stage improv scene.  It was a little too wide open, and those less comfortable with getting on-stage and going into character focused more on that than the ideas.  I could have set the scene as ‘two people sitting in a cafe preparing for an upcoming board meeting on innovation.’  I’m not sure if this will be an improvement, but it is worth trying it out.

• Like the game ‘telephone’, I want to see what happens if I start with one person and once they have told their part of the story they pass it on to the person next to them.  Again, this is a more linear process and might not have the dynamics of the multi-person dialogue.  Of course, I might try doing both if time permits.

• Keep the on-stage Freeze game moving quicker, and make sure to call it quits when things start slowing down.

In closing, keep this in mind whenever you are doing any kind of brainstorming - No matter how good your idea generating techniques are, you always need to mix it up.  Once your brainstorming process becomes routine to a group, the pool of ideas suffer.  I have come up with what I thought were ideal brainstorming methods, but the more I ran a single approach with a given team the less effective it became.  Keep things new and fresh, and your team will return the favor!