Brainstorming opens the door to creativity, helping businesses develop new ways of becoming more productive. The most innovative brainstorming sessions are those that rely on differences of opinions and healthy debates. For that reason, it’s important to set up a few rules for brainstorming sessions to ensure everyone understands what to expect.

Encourage Debate

It may be easier to dismiss topics that create conflict in the group, but you may be doing the group, and your organization, a disservice. Allowing members of your team to debate an issue will help everyone consider different viewpoints, which can help them to function better together. Additionally, many great ideas are born out of conflict, so allowing some debate in your brainstorming sessions can lead to ideas that you might not have otherwise considered.

Keep Discussions on Target

While debate is healthy and helpful, letting it go too far from the topic will only be a waste of time. As the leader of your team, it will be up to you to determine when a debate has gone too far and has become irrelevant. When this happens, you can decide to terminate the debate, or steer it back to the original idea or thought. The ultimate goal is to develop good ideas that your organization can put into practice, so every debate should focus on solving the particular problem at hand.

Setting guidelines for brainstorming sessions can help limit the time that’s wasted on bad ideas. Additionally, it can help encourage the suggestion of more good ideas. Over time, everyone on your team will work harder to come up with more innovative and useful ideas. In this way, implementing a few guidelines will help your team work better together, promoting stronger creativity among everyone. While it will take time for everyone to get used to the new guidelines, putting them into practice will help everyone on your team become more productive and creative.