How to Run an Effective Ideation Session

We’ve covered before that you need fluency, flexibility and originality to come up with high quality ideas, but running an ideation session to encourage those qualities can be a challenge.

In this article, I’ll show you how to generate, organise, and prioritise ideas in ways that tap into your team's full creative potential.

The Three Big Challenges with Brainstorming

1. Premature Convergence

People latch onto the first good idea they hear in an effect that psychologists call “anchoring”. This effect can be particularly strong when senior team members speak first, causing others to build upon or modify existing ideas rather than offering truly novel perspectives. This limits creativity and narrows the scope of potential solutions.

2. Blank Page Syndrome

Staring at a blank page can be intimidating, especially when asked to “think outside the box.” Without structure or prompts, participants can struggle to contribute, leading to awkward silences, reduced participation and uninspired ideas.

3. Lack of Incubation

Great ideas rarely emerge fully formed in an hour-long meeting. Our brains need time to process information, make connections, and generate insights. The best ideas often come in the shower the next day when it’s too late to share them.

Better Approaches for Idea Generation

To tackle these issues, you need a process that encourages diverse contributions, provides structure, and allows time for ideas to mature. Here’s how:

Step 1: Use Brainwriting to Ensure Every Idea is Heard

Brainwriting is a simple but powerful alternative to traditional brainstorming. Instead of speaking aloud, participants write ideas down silently, either on paper or using a digital tool. Once complete, the ideas are shared and built upon by the group.

Why it works:

• It prevents groupthink by allowing individuals to contribute independently.

• Introverts and quieter team members are more likely to share their thoughts.

• It avoids dominance by extroverts or senior leaders.

How to implement:

1. Ask participants to write down as many ideas as they can related to the problem at hand.

2. Push people to come up with at least 25+ ideas

3. Get everyone to share their ideas with the group for discussion

Step 2: Apply Structured Ideation Techniques Like SCAMPER

People will struggle to come up with 25 distinct ideas to solve a problem. This is where the facilitator can shine. While people are coming up with ideas they can inject some structured frameworks like SCAMPER to help spark creativity and provide direction. SCAMPER encourages participants to think about the problem through seven lenses:

• Substitute: What can we replace?

• Combine: What ideas can we merge?

• Adapt: How can we use something differently?

• Modify: What can we change?

• Put to another use: How else can this be applied?

• Eliminate: What can we remove?

• Rearrange: What can we reorder?

For example, if brainstorming ways to increase user engagement with a mobile app:

• Substitute: Replace text instructions with gamified tutorials.

• Eliminate: Remove unnecessary steps in the user journey.

There are a lot of other techniques that you can use as well such as systematic perspective rotation, analogies, reversing assumptions and more. The key is to give people a structured way of thinking to get past the blank page syndrome.

Step 3: Split Ideation into Two Sessions

Creativity often happens when people aren’t actively thinking about the problem. That’s why it’s essential to split your ideation into two sessions.

Session 1:

• Focus on idea generation using brainwriting and structured ideation techniques.

• Capture all ideas, no matter how incomplete or unconventional.

Session 2 (next day):

• Review and expand on the ideas from Session 1.

• Discuss connections, refine concepts, and identify the most promising directions.

This approach leverages the power of the brain’s default mode network, which processes information and makes creative connections during downtime. By giving your team time to think about the problem and then come back to it, you’re more likely to see a breakthrough.

The Challenge of Too Many Ideas

If you’re successful, and every participant generates 25+ ideas, you are going to end up with hundreds of ideas! We need to reduce this down to a more manageable number of ideas to take through to the next phase.

The first step in this process is to organise ideas into themes or categories. This step is crucial for identifying patterns, but it is not as straightforward as it may seem. I’ve been in ideation sessions where people misinterpret an idea and merge two quite distinct ideas together. Unless it is challenged immediately, which can be difficult, the nuance behind the ideas can be lost forever.

We could try to solve this by asking everyone to group all of the ideas separately, like we did with our brainwriting approach. But the reality is that most groupings are not controversial so duplicating that effort across every person is not a good use of time. Luckily there is another way.

Round Robin Grouping

Round robin grouping is a structured approach to ensure that everyone has a chance to review and refine the groupings.

1. Initial Grouping: The facilitator creates the initial categories. The overnight break is a great opportunity to do the grouping while being efficient with everyone’s time.

2. Grouping Explanation: The facilitator explains the groups and gives a quick overview of the ideas in each group.

3. Round Robin Review: Each participant, in turn, can make one adjustment, explaining their reasoning to the team.

4. Consensus Building: The process continues until everyone agrees on the final groupings.

The discussion portion ensures that everyone has a chance to explain the nuances of their ideas and that the group can build on each other’s thoughts.

Prioritising Ideas

You’ve managed to condense your hundreds of ideas into neat groups but you are still left with potentially dozens of great ideas. How do you choose which to pursue?

Using one of the common scoring frameworks like RICE, Kano, or Cost of Delay might sound appealing, but these frameworks try to turn ill structured problems into structured ones, which results in lost context and nuance.

The unsettling truth is that most of our ideas will be bad. 90% of features fail to deliver the expected business value. What we need to do is avoid spending too much time debating ideas because in reality we’re just debating between two sets of unproven assumptions.

We still want to select the ideas that have the greatest chance of being successful though, and this is where we can take advantage of the wisdom of crowds. Although any single person’s predictions tend to be unreliable, combining perspectives across group of people yields much more accurate predictions. That is why betting markets are often more accurate than polling data during elections.

Simple Voting

Use a voting approach to quickly surface the most popular ideas.

How it works:

1. Each participant is given 3 dot votes to distribute among the ideas they find most promising.

2. People can vote how they please (e.g. all three dots on one idea or distribute them across three ideas)

3. The top 3 ideas with the most votes are selected

4. If there is a tie, then you can remove the top idea and ask people to vote again among the remaining items.  

The Ideation Agenda

Bringing it all together we can create an agenda for our brainstorming sessions.

Day 1 (2 - 3 hours)

1. Brainwriting (1-2 hours): Team members individually write down at least 25 ideas each. The facilitator helps people to come up with more diverse ideas using techniques like SCAMPER, structured perspective rotation, reversing assumptions or other approaches.

2. Idea Sharing (1 hour): Everyone posts their ideas to a shared space and gives a quick explanation of each idea.

Ideation Break

1. Overnight Incubation: Everyone breaks for the day allowing their brains to work on the problem in the “background”.

2. Facilitator Grouping: The facilitator groups the ideas to merge similar ideas together.

Day 2 (1.5 hours)

1. Brainwriting (15 mins): Each person documents the new ideas that they came up with overnight.

2. Grouping overview (15 mins): The facilitator explains the grouping that they have created and recaps on the ideas in the groups.

3. New idea sharing (10 mins): People place their new ideas into the existing groups or they place them as new standalone groups.

4. Round Robin Grouping (30 mins): Each person moves ideas they believe are incorrectly grouped. This continues until all people are satisfied.

5. Voting (15 mins): Each person votes on the ideas they believe have the greatest chance of achieving the business goals. Continue voting until 3 clear winners emerge.

Conclusion

Running an effective ideation session doesn’t have to feel like herding cats. Using a structured approach you can overcome the main challenges of ideation, unlock your team’s creative potential and turn abstract ideas into actionable solutions.

So next time you’re tasked with coming up with solutions for customer problems, give this approach a try and I’d love to hear how you get on.