I love reading Scott Berkun's work over at UIWEB! A recent piece that he wrote on getting through creative burnout has turned out to be very helpful to a couple of people, including me. There is sometimes a great deal of value in just blogging your daily experiences in whatever company you're working in or with, because there are certainly many ways to do things, and it's always great to learn how someone else approaches a problem, especially if they do a better job of solving that you or I can!

This latest essay on shepherding a well-run creative brainstorming session is one of the most comprehensive overviews on this subject that I have seen. I encourage you to read the whole thing (it's a long post) if you're at all interested in this sort of thing, but by way of summary, here are a few of the finer points.

• Location matters: Find a comfortable quiet room. If you can, pick a space not used by your team for any other purpose. Caffeine is a plus, as is food, comfy chairs, or anything you can think of that will help the people on your team to be playful.
  
• Have a specific purpose: The leader of the meeting should arrive with a specific question he's trying to answer or problem to explore.
  
• Know what you want, and what to do with it: If you are looking for a big raw list of news ideas to review later, then have a plan for how you'll review it. The simplest strategy is to plan an hour afterwards, for yourself alone, to pull out the 5 or 10 most interesting ideas (based on your opinion, or the group's) and examine them in detail.
  
• Know how to facilitate: Someone has to run the meeting, guiding the conversation in useful directions.
  
• Put the focus on the list: The whiteboard or easel should be the focal point of the meeting. Make it clear to everyone in the room that you are getting together with the goal of adding as many items as possible to that whiteboard.
  
• Comfort is key: Creative thinking involves exploring non-obvious and non-traditional ideas to find unexpected good ones. To find them you have to sort through many potential embarrassing, silly, goofy, or outrageous ideas.
  
• Establish the ground rules: This can help to establish comfort and make the time more useful. Will the meeting be a free for all, where anyone can suggest things at any time? Who will write things down and document the proceedings? Do what you can to reward team play: brainstorming should be about communicating, not competing.
  
• Postpone criticism: This is the creativity killer. Evaluating ideas too much kills new ideas. It does. Our minds shut down in a way if too much analysis goes on.

Se also Andrew Hargadon's article on Brainstorming at IDEO(scroll down the page):
Brainstorming Groups in Context: Effectiveness in a Product Design Firm