At Sparks, we believe the best ideas emerge when the right people get together.
Article content
The topic: how to run a brainstorming session that actually works. And if you’ve ever walked out of a session wondering what just happened, you were in exactly the right room.
The keynote was led by Mehdi En-Naizi, facilitator, podcast host, and creator of the Workshop Deck. Over 60 minutes, he shared everything he’s learned about what makes brainstorms take off… and what quietly kills them before they even start. Most brainstorms are broken by design. Here’s what stayed with us.
Mehdi opened with a clip from a TV show: a team lead launches a chaotic session, no setup, instant judgment, ideas shot down as fast as they’re raised. The room laughed. Then nodded. The scene is exaggerated. The dynamic is very real. And according to Mehdi, it all comes down to one core mistake: jumping straight to ideas before the group is ready to generate them.
The biggest obstacle to creativity isn’t a shortage of good ideas. It’s the fear of being judged. When you skip the setup and ask people to perform on the spot, you trigger exactly that fear. Most go quiet. The ones who don’t say something safe.
- Explore and frame the problem first
Before anyone generates a single idea, the group needs to actually understand what they’re solving for. Not just hear the brief, sit with it. Turn it over. Look at it from multiple angles. Rush past this step, and you get ideas that answer the wrong question. Slow down here, and everything that follows gets sharper.
-
Add an inspiration moment
Before asking for ideas, show the group how someone else tackled a similar challenge. A startup in a different industry. A surprising case study. A real example of a solution that worked. Mehdi calls this the brainstorm appetiser. It dissolves the blank page, makes the goal feel tangible, and sparks thinking people wouldn’t have reached on their own.
-
Go silent first
The number one barrier to creativity is fear of judgment. Anonymous, individual idea-writing removes that fear. Same colour sticky note, same marker, no names attached. Ideas compete on their own merit, not on who pitched them most confidently. The quiet person in the room contributes as much as the loudest one. Every time.
-
Focus on quantity, not quality
Counterintuitive, but ideation is a numbers game. The more ideas on the table, the better the chances of finding something genuinely good. Pressure to produce the best idea makes people freeze. Permission to produce many ideas makes them move. There’s even a famous pottery class study that proves it: the group asked to make as many pots as possible consistently produced better pots than the group asked to make one perfect one.
-
Timebox the session
Research shows that time limits lead to more and better ideas. A little pressure fuels creativity rather than hindering it. Short, tight windows push people to generate without overthinking. And as a facilitator, it gives you control of the room.
-
Never skip breaks
Breaks aren’t downtime, they’re part of the process. The brain keeps working even when you step away from the table. Subconscious processing happens during breaks, and some of the best ideas surface in the hallway, not in the session itself. Planning breaks at the right moments is good design, full stop.
-
Design the right environment
A room that looks and feels different from a standard meeting room already signals to participants that this is a different kind of session. Natural light, a cleared and flexible space, snacks, a bit of music. None of this is decoration. It shifts the mindset before a single word is spoken.
-
Use warm-ups with intention
A Harvard study showed that groups who did warm-up activities before brainstorming generated more and better ideas than those who jumped straight in. The warm-up doesn’t even have to be related to the topic. What matters is that it wakes up the creative muscle and lowers the threshold for participation.
One of Mehdi’s favourites: ask participants to draw a sunset. First pass, everyone draws the same thing, the line, the half-circle, maybe some birds. Then ask them to draw their best memory of a sunset. The results are completely different: richer, more personal, more unexpected. That shift - from generic to specific, from automatic to intentional - is exactly what you want to carry into the ideation that follows.
One thing Mehdi was clear about: don’t call it an icebreaker. The word carries too much baggage. Just run the activity and let it do its work.
