Meetings to generate ideas or answer questions – ‘Brainstorming’
Brainstorming meetings can be disastrous, often eating up time and leading to poor decisions.
The next time you need to make a decision or come up with a new idea in a group, call timeout and
give the ‘note-and-vote’ method a try. Emerging from the 1960s and otherwise known as the
Nominal Group Technique, companies like Google have adopted the method below to generate
awesome ideas quick-smart. I’ve used this a handful of times when I knew we needed to get some
quick but solid ideas going with teams that have struggled to be creative in the past.
1. Note: Distribute paper and pens to each person in the meeting. Set a timer for five to 10
minutes. Everyone writes down as many ideas as they can.
2. Self-edit: Set the timer for two minutes. Each person reviews his or her own list and picks
one or two favorites.
3. Share and capture: One at a time, each person shares his or her top idea(s). No sales pitch.
Just say what you wrote and move on.
4. Vote: Set the timer for five minutes. Each person chooses a favorite from the ideas on the
whiteboard.
5. Share and capture: One at a time, each person says their vote.
6. Decide: Who is the decider? She [or he] should make the final call—not the group.
7. Rejoice: That only took 15 minutes!
The “Note and Vote” technique works by circumventing the usual suspects that cause brainstorming
meetings to go awry: personal feelings, fear of being unheard, and building ideas off one another
rather than focusing on originality.
This approach forces your meetings to be run in parallel (where everyone is contributing at the same
time, without shouting) whereas traditional meetings are run in a serial, linear fashion.
Originally written by Jake Knapp, Design Partner at Google Ventures.