Brainstorm better: ideation should be energizing, not endless
Use time-boxed ideation activities to hear from your team, align your goals, and build strong scientific collaborations.
It began with an Instagram ad for an ebook: “tired of meetings where only one person talks?”
The ebook asked a question that I think resonates with most of us in corporate jobs: Are you tired of brainstorming meetings where only a few loud people share their ideas, and the meeting ends with no real conclusions other than that you need to meet again? Yes. Yes, I am.
Spinning our wheels at academic publishing
It was the start of 2022, and my team had spent the last 18 months watching other academic research laboratories leverage remote work restrictions to craft convincing grant proposals and publish academic papers. What had we been doing? We had been brainstorming proposal ideas and discussing paper outlines, with one or two team members interrupting other contributors and sketching out half-formed stories. Meetings concluded with the team scheduling another meeting to keep “working together” to hammer out the plot.
Feeling defeated, I pushed back from my desk. I would close out my day reading that ebook I had downloaded several months before: Jonathan Courtney’s The Workshopper Playbook.
Picking up the pace of writing grants
Concepts in the book immediately caught my attention. Jonathan discusses how to transform brainstorming meetings that feel non-productive and prone to groupthink into structured mini workshops that (a) empower each member to contribute and (b) always conclude with clear action items upon which each team member can agree. Workshops like these turned out to be a game changer for not only my team but our whole company.
Building off concepts presented in The Workshopper Playbook and a book by Jake Knapp called Sprint, I first tackled collaborative grant proposal development. I designed and piloted a 3-part sprint workshop that allowed our team to hear from experts in the room (both confident leaders and quieter, less-senior contributors), brainstorm possible directions, agree on the most promising ideas, and form a plan for how to bring these ideas together for a grant application. The workshop provided a logical, left-brained process for scientists to sort through open-ended research ideas and develop concrete research plans.
Origin of Sprints
Design sprints originated with Jake Knapp at Google Ventures. He developed the sprint process to help Google Ventures and the companies it invests in to prototype and validate projects rapidly and effectively in just one week.
For example, a coffee company wanted to build an online store… a project that could take a long time and many years of refinement. Rather than slog through many meetings and endless discussions of how the online store should function, they decided to run a design sprint. During the sprint, the coffee team worked together to map out the customer experience — from who the customer was to what a positive customer outcome might look like, refining their ideas with help from experts on each step of the customer experience. They then created three rough prototypes of websites and presented them to potential future customers to see how they responded. Based on the testers’ feedback, the team eliminated the design that they had initially been most excited about and moved forward with one of the other designs; they had learned in one short week what would be compelling to customers, without the need for weeks of meetings and months of refinement!
Sprints for scientific ideation
I adapted this prototyping process to support scientific ideation, allowing my teams to rapidly develop grant applications and collaborative projects in about nine (9) hours. Not surprisingly, developing a grant proposal is quite different than developing a website. I could use the general flow of Knapp’s design sprints but had to get creative in adapting the process after the first few steps.
Here’s how the Project Development Sprint work:
LISTEN + SET GOALS
Meet the team
You start by gathering your team. This team is a group of experts who specialize in different aspects of the project, and you will get to hear from some of them about the cool science they are already doing. A diverse team is an asset; consider including postdocs, PIs, grant writers, and other project drivers — such as graduate students or research staff. The key is to keep your team to seven members or less.
Hear from the experts
While you listen to the experts present research related to your project, everyone will take notes using a special format: “how might we…” questions. “How might we…” questions help us define our biggest challenges, without prescribing solutions. These questions grease our mental wheels.
After compiling and organizing these questions, you will have the opportunity to anonymously vote on the challenges that you think are most important and interesting. Based on the top-voted challenges, everyone will work “alone together” to each draft an inspirational long-term goal for the project. “Alone together” or “silently alongside one another” is a key strength of project development sprints because it allows all voices to be heard — not just the loudest or most charismatic. Once each person’s long-term goal has been shared, the team will vote to choose an inspirational overall goal for the project.
Establish a focus
After listening to the experts, organizing our questions, and choosing a goal, it is important to establish a map of the science. How do all of these parts fit together? By framing the project in terms of actors (e.g., cells, inputs) on the left, “outcomes” (e.g., disease outcomes, cells states) on the right, and “possible mechanisms” that connect the two, this map provides a high-level overview of the team’s current understanding of the project and identifies places where the team wants to expand their understanding.
IDEATE + ALIGN
Ideate
Now that we know where we want to go, we have to figure out how to get there. So, after a break and grabbing your favorite snack (we believe happy stomachs create happy minds), we will work through four ideation exercises, taking us from quick rough ideas to more detailed proposals. By the end of the exercises, you will have fleshed out a concept that encompasses what you want to investigate and how. You’ll give it a catchy title, and then you’ll prepare an anonymous 3-slide pitch deck explaining your idea.
Share your ideas and align
After taking time to quietly read and absorb the concepts, each team member will get a chance to vote for the bits of the presented concepts that they like best. When all the voting is complete, each team member gets to point out their favorite concept and explain why they like it. These beloved concepts will be combined to form one “target concept” and will be the foundation for putting pen to paper for a project proposal. And congrats, you are now two thirds of the way done with the sprint!
OUTLINE + EXPAND + REFINE
Outline the project
The last phase of the project development sprint focuses on building a concrete project plan in three steps: outline, expand, and refine. In this phase, each person will use stickies to outline the project from hypothesis to expected outcomes, using the chosen concepts as guides. Here again, the team will vote, narrowing down all the suggestions in order to hone in on a single project arc (which could be a mash-up of several arcs).
Expand the project outline
Lastly, you’ll expand your chosen project arc into a more detailed slide deck that contains all of the details that you will need to move your project or collaboration to the next level. For this step, your team will divide up into small groups, each group claiming a piece of the arc to flesh out. The great thing is, you’ve already done a lot of the work without even knowing it! You can grab figures and chunks of text from your concepts and drop them right into your slide deck.
Refine
Once the whole deck is drafted, you’ll corporately walk through the slides and edit, refining ideas and prose.
DELIVERABLES
Get that proposal drafted in less than 10 hours
And there you have it! Through a handful of fun activities and a few simple voting sessions, you have a detailed outline of your proposed project with peer-reviewed text and some rough figures ready to be dropped into a proposal or aims page.
Skip the never-ending discussions
This sprint process allows you to skip the countless brainstorming meetings and never-ending discussions. Instead, your team (whether or not all are at the same institute or location) can dedicate a specific amount of time to a sprint and know that by the end of the sprint, you will have agreed on and refined your project objectives and outlined your approach.
PRODUCTIVE + INCLUSIVE
As word got out about my sprint workshops, I began to be asked to facilitate collaborative ideation for other teams across the company. From graduate students to faculty to our chief scientific officer, participants raved about how the workshops succeeded in being not only results-oriented but also inclusive. By adding structure to collaborative discussions, my workshops allowed all voices to be heard — not just the loudest or most charismatic.
Next up: accelerating academic publishing
Since that snowy January day, I have had the opportunity to run five Project Development Sprints for three collaborative teams (including a team spanning three countries), two ideation sessions for senior leadership at our annual corporate retreat, and a new paper-planning workshop piloted this past week. I feel immense satisfaction each time a participant walks into the workshop feeling unsure if they will be heard, and walks out feeling appreciated by their team and excited to dive into the agreed upon project plan.
Providing an avenue for collaboration that has the power to both drive productivity and amplify voices that are often silenced — be it based on seniority, sex, gender, or race — is incredibly rewarding, and if the new workshop we debuted last week is any indication, we are only beginning to uncover the possibilities.
CREDITS
Matthew Vos — illustrator + animator
Jake Knapp — original Design Sprint process developer
Jonathan Courtney — author of The Workshopper Playbook
Kelsey Williams — creative director + Project Development Sprint process developer (adapted from Sprint)
Van Andel Institute — funder and host
