# Brainstorming: What It Is and How to Run a Session That Works Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making/brainstorming/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making/brainstorming.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving decision-making at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Brainstorming is group idea generation with judgment held back until the end. Osborn's four rules, the two phases, and six steps to run a session that works. ## Key facts - Title: Brainstorming: What It Is and How to Run a Session That Works - Category: Decision Making - Primary skill: Decision-Making - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: brainstorming - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making/brainstorming/ ## What this page covers - Brainstorming is group idea generation with judgment held back until the end. Osborn's four rules, the two phases, and six steps to run a session that works. - Practical guidance for brainstorming - How this topic connects to Decision-Making ## Detailed explanation Brainstorming is a group method for generating ideas: everyone produces as many possibilities as they can for one clearly defined problem, judgment is deliberately held back while the ideas are coming, and only afterward does the group narrow the pile down to something it can act on. Alex Osborn named the method in *Applied Imagination* in 1953, and the four rules he wrote still define it. What most of us inherit, though, is the picture rather than the method — a room, a whiteboard, and a vague instruction to think creatively. That is a different thing, and it is the reason so many sessions end with four ideas, three of them from the same person. ## What brainstorming is, and the two phases it runs on Osborn's original ground rules were that criticism is ruled out, freewheeling is welcomed, quantity is wanted, and combination and improvement are sought. Stated the way most teams now hear them: - **Defer judgment.** Ideas get written down during the session but are not assessed or critiqued until later. The point is not politeness. It is that assessment, even mild assessment, inhibits people mid-production and they stop offering the unfinished thoughts a brainstorm exists to surface. - **Go for quantity.** The working assumption is that quantity breeds quality — the more ideas on the wall, the better the odds that one of them is genuinely different rather than merely acceptable. - **Encourage wild ideas.** No idea is too absurd, because the absurd one is frequently the thing that gives someone else a usable one two minutes later. - **Combine and improve.** Participants build on and refine each other's best ideas rather than each defending their own. Underneath the rules sit two phases. Divergence comes first: generate as many unfiltered ideas as possible. Convergence comes second: combine, refine, and [evaluate them](/knowledge/decision-making/decision-matrix/). Keeping the phases apart is the single most useful discipline in the method — though it is worth knowing that recent research suggests [divergent and convergent thinking](/knowledge/decision-making/divergent-thinking/) actually occur concurrently during ideation and should not be treated as fully separable stages. In practice, that means the discipline is about *when the group speaks its judgments aloud*, not about switching off part of your brain. It is also worth being honest about what the evidence says. A large body of studies and meta-analyses has found that face-to-face groups tend to generate fewer and lower-quality ideas than nominal groups — the same number of people working alone with their output pooled afterward. The usual explanations are production blocking (only one person can talk at a time), evaluation apprehension, and free-riding. And one recent study of the rules themselves found that, of Osborn's four, only the perceived importance of *combine and improve* significantly predicted how many ideas a group produced. None of that makes group brainstorming pointless. It tells you where the group is weak (generating) and where it is strong (building and choosing), and the sequence below is built around that split. ## How to run a brainstorming session, step by step Each step depends on the one before it. The order matters more than the tools. ### 1. Check that a brainstorm is the right meeting A recurring finding in the practitioner literature is that many sessions are mislabeled — they are actually discussions, or, at worst, venting sessions, run under a name that promises something else. Before you book anything, ask whether you want new options or a decision between options you already have. If it is the second, you need a [decision meeting](/knowledge/decision-making/collaborative-decision-making/), not a brainstorm. Sessions also fail because participants read the rules but do not follow them, which is [a facilitation problem](/knowledge/communication/running-effective-meetings/) rather than a creativity one. ### 2. Turn the problem into one written question Preparation is where most of the outcome is determined. Write the challenge as a single question, specific enough that you would recognize a good answer and open enough that there is more than one. State the real constraints — budget, timeline, anything genuinely off the table — in the same breath, because constraints revealed halfway through a session kill momentum that constraints stated up front would have focused. Then send it out. People who think more slowly arrive with something to contribute instead of nothing. ### 3. Say the rules out loud before anyone speaks Open the session by naming the four rules and the objective, and by saying explicitly that evaluation comes later. This takes ninety seconds and it is not a formality. Some people arrive with a genuine fear of these sessions — fear of being criticized, of being pulled into a conflict, or of what the outcome will change — and stating the rules aloud is what gives them cover. Extroverted and quick-thinking participants tend to fill the available space; announcing that everyone contributes is how you make the later steps enforceable rather than awkward. ### 4. Get quantity first, in writing, before it is spoken Start with silent individual generation: hand out sticky notes or open a shared board and give everyone a few minutes to write their own ideas down with no discussion. This one move is what buys you the nominal-group advantage inside a real meeting — nobody waits their turn, so nobody's idea decays while they hold it. Only then put the notes up on the wall. If you recognize yourself as the person whose best idea arrived in the car on the way home, it is worth [seeing what holds you back](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) — that gap is a learnable one, not a fixed feature of your personality. ### 5. Spend real time combining and improving Read the ideas out one at a time, ask for whatever clarification is needed, and group them into three or four categories, as the Business Development Bank of Canada's session guide describes. Then work the category that has the most in it. This is the step teams cut when they run short, and it is the one the research points at: building on and refining each other's ideas is the rule most closely tied to how much a group actually produces. Deliberately keep evaluation out of it — "we tried that in March" belongs to the next step. ### 6. Converge, then give every surviving idea a name Now judge. A simple mechanic works well: ask everyone to put a check mark or a star next to their three to five favorites, then carry the top cluster forward. Record what you set aside and why, so the same idea is not re-litigated next month. Finally, write a short summary of the ideas, the decisions, and the next steps, share it with everyone who was in the room, and turn each surviving idea into a task with an owner and a deadline. A session that ends with a photographed whiteboard and no name attached to anything has produced nothing at all. ## The habits underneath a session that produces something Read back over those six steps and notice how little of the work is creative. Framing a question, holding a room to a rule, drawing out the person who has not spoken, and closing the loop afterward — that is what separates a session that produces something from one that produces a photograph. Those are habits, and people learn them. **Decision-Making** is what the whole sequence is really part of, because a brainstorm is the front half of a work decision rather than an event in its own right. That means knowing your actual authority before you start — whether this group can decide the thing, or is only advising someone who will — and using the practices that keep the decision sound: getting an opinion from people who disagree with you, slowing down when the room is rushed, accepting "good enough" instead of holding out for perfect, and allowing some uncertainty rather than waiting for information that is not coming. It also names the traps that quietly steer a session: confirmation bias toward the option someone walked in already favoring, and the sunk-cost pull of last quarter's idea. **Communication** decides how much of what people think ever reaches the wall. The behaviors that matter are unglamorous ones: speaking up rather than assuming someone else will, being clear and direct instead of hedging an idea into invisibility, stating the main point first, and being brief enough that other people still have room. On the receiving side it is giving full attention, listening actively rather than queuing your own reply, and managing interruptions so a half-formed idea gets to finish. Keeping a record of what was said is part of the same skill, and it is what makes step six possible. **Teamwork** is what makes "build on the ideas of others" more than a slogan. It runs on putting the common purpose ahead of your own agenda, sharing what you know freely instead of holding it for a moment when it will land better, and giving credit to the group rather than tracking whose idea won. It is also what handles the aftermath: disagreeing openly while the choice is still open, then committing to what the group decided instead of reopening it in the corridor. Those three sit inside a set of twelve work skills the framework treats as buildable rather than innate, and the free Job Skills Test will show you [which skill to build first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) — useful, because the thing limiting your sessions is rarely the thing you assume it is. Some of this may already describe how you work: you might be the one who writes a few options down before the meeting starts, or who notices when the room has quietly settled on the first thing anyone said. None of that is a personality type. It is practice, and the parts that do not come naturally yet are simply the parts you have not done often enough — you can build them without becoming a different person in meetings. It also counts for more over time, not less. Early on, someone usually hands you the question already framed and someone else decides what happens to the ideas. The further you go, the more often you are the one framing the question and carrying the outcome, and the more expensive a session that generates twenty options and commits to none becomes. By reading this far you have already done the part most people skip — treating a flat session as a process with fixable parts rather than a bad day. ## Find out which part is yours to fix The only thing left is to see where you actually stand. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills that takes about seven minutes: it maps you across all twelve, including the decision habits, listening, and group behaviors that decide whether a brainstorming session ends in a plan or a wall of sticky notes, and it shows you which of them will make the biggest difference right now. You will not get another technique out of it. You will get something more useful — a clear read on which of the ones you already know you are not actually using. **[Take the test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and about seven minutes from start to results.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Brainstorming is group idea generation with judgment held back until the end. Osborn's four rules, the two phases, and six steps to run a session that works. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Decision-Making. It also relates to Communication, Teamwork. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making/brainstorming/ Preferred summary: "Brainstorming is group idea generation with judgment held back until the end. Osborn's four rules, the two phases, and six steps to run a session that works." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.