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Comment by throw82473751 | Hacker News Reader

Brainstorming meetings are usually a fail anyway, resulting in the lowest common denominator solution chosen, or the one of the loudest/strongest persons in the room. Much more superior is tasking the right person (or duo/trio) with thinking through it and proposing one solution or alternatives with trafeoffs.

"Brainstorming meetings" so often for people who want to spread responsibility for bad decisions without admitting they have no clue even beyond the problem :(

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If you go into a brainstorming session with the expectation that you will choose anything, you're right, they are usually going to fail. If you go into them with the sole purpose of exploring a problem space and gathering a diversity of viewpoints, but not evaluating ideas, they can be amazingly valuable. My other two points of advice are to:

1) Keep them short (30-45 minutes). Do them just before lunch so people have a hard stop but also an opportunity to keep the discussion going in an even less structured way. 2) Keep them small (3-5 people). If you've got a dozen people you want to include, break it up, and then if you need/want, do some follow ups where you can group people differently and iterate on some earlier ideas.

Brainstorming asynchronously on a shared doc of some sort (google doc, miro board, even slides) is way better. Kick off with a meeting to set some parameters and answer questions, then let everyone enter ideas at their leisure for a week and regroup to dicuss.

The most effective seems to be to do the first round independently, IE each person come with their 2-3 best ideas before collaboration. Otherwise there's a strong tendency to just +1 existing ideas rather than think independently.

I was going to say this exactly. We've started doing this recently and it's worked really well.

We'll start off with a topic and give everyone, say, 15 minutes to write ideas in the doc on their own. Then take the next 15 minutes to read digest what everyone else wrote, and then rest of the time to discuss as a group.

It's great because it gives everyone a chance to think through the topic and share their perspective, but also you can quickly see the common themes.

I feel the same way. There is even a culture of 'how to run successful brainstorming sessions' at my employer (sometimes called sprints). I have never once enjoyed that process, and I have never seen the result of those sessions be worthwhile or any better than just sitting down for 15 mins 1:1 with team members and talking through the problem. My feeling is that extroverts love them because it's a social gathering at work. I work in user experience.

The same logic applies to literally any meeting for any purpose.

A meeting should only ever be between two or three people. Any more and it's just a waste of time.

The responsibility of whatever topic is on the team’s (not on individuals). So if a decision must be made then the whole team should feel responsible for it.

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