Brainstorming tools

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 8, 2021 at 09:51 AM

Brainstorming is a great activity, but as multiple studies have shown, brainstorming around a table – especially in corporate groups – is not always productive.

More productive, it appears, is brainstorming at remote, i.e. setting several people the same problem and asking them to come up with ideas BEFORE discussing the latter. This approach can (but doesn’t necessarily) remove inhibitions associated with status, “pleasing the boss”, non-confrontational vs. confrontational personalities, etc. etc.

We use brainstorming a lot in our creative writing/transcreation work, but always by gathering ideas first, then processing them as a team.

And no, I’ve not so far come across any tool that actively galvanises this process. Tools we use include whiteboarding and videoconferencing software, or simply sketches produced on any number of sketch-friendly apps (including Apple Notes!).

There are, however, idea-stimulating tools around. I’m struggling to remember any names, because frankly, whenever I’ve tested such a tool, the approach has seemed to me either (a) too constraining / over-structured or (b) too bullsh*t-ridden or (c) a mixture of both.

One of the best tips I can give is making sure the thing you’re brainstorming about is as clearly defined as possible. When people start blue-sky thinking, they tend to get quite excited and can rapidly zoom off at a tangent/all sorts of tangents. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it isn’t good, either.

So it’s really, really important (and I speak as someone who regularly deals with multilingual/multicultural teams in many different countries) to make sure the basic parameters of the “problem” are defined as clearly as possible.

I’ve tried writing my own briefsheets for this, with all kinds of definitions and fields. But once again, this isn’t something that’s easy to standardise. We now use a number of bullet points as the starting point for writing briefs, simply to remind us of things that MUST be mentioned – but these are very much general guides and not set in stone.

To paraphrase a finding from a totally different industry: while a car with AI-driven driver assistance systems may be safer to drive, a car without a human in it is positively dangerous… and there’s no likelihood that this will change anytime soon, due to the fundamental AI issue of “mapping”.

You could say the same of brainstorming. At the end of the day, the human brain is capable of lateral thinking that far exceeds AI capacities. Although AI can be very helpful in coming up with ideas that may not occur to a human at all.