Let’s say you’re having a club meeting to come up with ideas to raise money next year.  Here’s how to make that meeting a lot more productive, courtesy of the business/marketing class I took last week.

1. Don’t have the meeting where you normally meet to do work.  Go someplace else like a restaurant.
2. Assign one person who won’t participate and instead will just take notes (not for the entire meeting, but just for this quick brainstorming exercise). 
3. You are allowed to contribute ideas, but you are not allowed to instruct or to criticize at all.  There is absolutely no commentary at this point (no, “Here’s why that won’t work”…).

Then spend 5-15 minutes making a list of every conceivable idea you can think of.  Just shout them out.  What will happen is that at first people will be hesitant.  They’ll edit their ideas and only share what they’re sure is good.  But the longer the exercise goes, the more outlandish the suggestions.  The more outlandish the suggestions, the less reluctant people are to share their own. 

We did this in the class I took. We broke into groups were told to come up with as many App ideas for the iPad as we could think of.  Nobody in our group had any idea how to make an app, but that didn’t matter.  In five minutes, we came up with 84 app ideas.  Most of them came in the final 2 ½ minutes.  Once we got going, the person taking notes couldn’t even keep up.

Some of the ideas were absolutely crazy.  But in looking at the list now, some of them were really good.

When people have a formal meeting to brainstorm and do it in the usual location, lots of people will be too afraid to contribute.  They’ll worry that it might sound stupid.  Or they’ll worry that people will criticize it.  Or they’ll worry that it might be genius and they’ll actually end up responsible for making it happen.  When you take those fears away and just let the ideas fly free, you’re going to end up with a long list.  Then you can just cherry pick the best ones.

Of course, the next step would be going through the list, picking out the ones the group likes best, discussing whether or not they’re feasible, and assigning people to actually take ownership of making the chosen ones happen.  But when you start with a long list, you’re far more likely to end up with winners. 

What would happen if your club tried this?

What if a college did this to come up with application essay questions for next year?

What if counselors did this to think up new events they could do for students and parents?

No way to know unless you try it.