Beyond brainstorming: 5 best practices for sparking great ideas

It’s tempting to get ideas flowing on a new creative project with a free-form, unstructured brainstorming session, welcoming any and all ideas. But when the only guideline is to keep the brainstorming positive, friendly, and non-judgmental, mediocre ideas can slip through—and good ideas might not go far enough.

So how do you create the conditions that lead to maximum creativity?

The digital storytellers at Blue Telescope have developed collaborative processes that leverage fruitful cross-pollination and encourage respectful criticism and debate. Here are a few of our ideas for teams to stay true to your stakeholders’ original ideas while working your own magic.

1. Make sure you have the right people at the table

Connecting minds that generally operate in different realms can produce thrilling and often surprising results.

Bring a wide variety of talents and perspectives to your projects. Then watch how the interconnections between ideas from science, art, technology, literature, music, and more inspire genuinely new ways of seeing a problem.

For the Driven to Win: Racing in America exhibit at The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, Blue Telescope helped expand the world of auto racing beyond the thrilling world of the driver’s seat to tell the stories of designers and strategists, the athletes in the pit crew, home hobbyists, and fans. Visitors who never considered themselves fans of auto racing found new ways to engage with this world, and picture themselves as a part of it.

More diverse representation results in a more meaningful and inclusive experience for all visitors.

2. Get crystal clear on the problem

Your “why” becomes the north star for the rest of the project. Everything must align with your purpose—and the problem to be solved.

During brainstorming, ask yourself: What does the problem look like? What are we solving, and what will happen if we solve it? What’s an example? And how will we define success?

Blue Telescope created exhibits for Kennedy Space Center

When Blue Telescope worked with Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Gateway: The Deep Space Launch Complex exhibits, the goal was to engage visitors and educate them about space. “To engage and educate” can be interpreted in a million different ways. While staying true to your original problem, how you can push the limits as you solve it?

Blue Telescope challenged itself to build an interactive gallery wall. Here, visitors launch satellites and learn about active space missions, going beyond engagement to create a sensory and meaningful experience that visitors are unlikely to forget.

3. Encourage (friendly!) criticism and debate as ideas emerge

Get ready for ridiculousness: it’s time to figure out the “how.” This phase of idea generation is essentially brainstorming that allows for healthy debate.

Empower the team to say anything that comes to mind. But the team needs to check their egos at the door. And everyone must be willing to be vulnerable and make a fool of themselves because most ideas won’t make it into the final project.

Envisioning how to make everything happen within a client’s schedule and budget triggers creative solutions —sometimes one that’s surprisingly easy and inexpensive.

4. Throw out ideas that won’t work—but not entirely

But even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands creative potential.

Rather than throwing them out on the spot, adopt “yes…and” principles from improv, which help expand ideas to find new and more interesting dimensions. People typically make suggestions because they are meaningful to them and connect back to the “why.” Exploring those ideas can be fruitful and reinforce the team’s commitment to solving the problem, even if they don’t make it into the final plan.

5. Move forward with consistency

Once you’ve defined your problem and agreed on a plan, it’s important to build checkpoints along the way to ensure that you’re on track.

When your team is being pulled in many different directions on a daily basis as they manage multiple projects, you need someone to hold the vision while the team moves forward.

That person should check in regularly to ensure a consistent approach across the board by asking these questions: are we sticking to what we decided? Are we solving this in the most interesting way possible? Are our choices as beautiful and creative as we thought?

We’ve found that bringing the right people to the table and making sure we’re staying true to our vision helps our projects consistently reap the benefits of those early days of idea generation. How does your team bring big ideas to life?