Have you ever attended a brainstorming session where a couple of outspoken participants dominated the conversation… or hundreds of ideas were thrown around the room but nobody recorded action items? We created a brainstorming meeting agenda template to help you avoid that!

Facilitating a great brainstorming session isn’t easy. However, preparing an agenda in advance will help you structure the conversation and empower everyone on your team to speak up and share their ideas.

Here’s a brainstorming meeting template you can use to facilitate these conversations:

Keep scrolling to read some ideas for your next brainstorming meeting!

1 Goal

What are the main goals for you and your team while brainstorming? Whether it is to come up with a new advertising campaign, boost sales, or hold an event. Make sure you have an idea of what you want to achieve during this brainstorming meeting.

The goal of brainstorming is to not only generate ideas with your team but solve current challenges and obstacles you might be facing. In a 2018 Ted Talk, Chic Thompson says:

“Life is a brainstorm. It’s not just about products. It’s about challenges.”

Before you start brainstorming on new ideas, make sure that everyone understands what the key objectives are. You can have a quick discussion about the meeting goals and write them down in your meeting agenda app.

2 Ground Rules

In order to have a successful brainstorming session, spend a couple of minutes laying down some ground rules. You should have these ground rules included in your brainstorming meeting agenda. This will help you ensure that the team stays focused and organized within your brainstorming meeting. Some of these ground rules could include:

• No interruptions
• Anonymous voting
• There are no “wrong” ideas
• Build off of each other’s ideas
• All ideas must be discussed systematically
• Write down your ideas throughout the meeting
• Don’t interrupt other people when they’re speaking

To generate good ideas, you need to set these ground rules, so your team does not lose track of the end goal. You should create an environment for your team to thrive and productively brainstorm.

3 Prompts

Part of building your brainstorming meeting agenda is coming up with prompts and questions for your team to answer during the meeting. Here are some ideas for prompts as suggested by Prompt’s article:

• 5 W’s: With the set topic given before the brainstorming meeting have your team answer Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? This will generate multiple answers and brainstorming meeting ideas from your team.

• Idea Mapping: Have your team members take your brainstorming meeting topic and circle it. Write down ideas relating to the topic, circle them, and link the ideas to the circled topic. This creates more specific ideas to the original topic for your brainstorming meeting agenda.

• “X is Y” Approach: This is a fill in the blank exercise your team can use to gain new perspectives on the ideas they have already shared.

 _______________ is/was/are/were _______________

An example: New advertising is a way to attract new clients.

4 Brainstorming session

Now, it’s time to start brainstorming. If you’re meeting at the office, one common practice is to hand out sticky notes and give participants a few minutes to write down their thoughts and ideas. You can then proceed to put up the sticky notes on a wall or whiteboard.

If you’re working remotely, an effective way to do this is to ask everyone to write down their ideas in a meeting agenda app such as Fellow.

Once everyone finishes wiring down their ideas, you can read them out loud and ask the idea owners for any needed clarification. This is a great opportunity for other team members to ask questions and voice any other new ideas that might come up as a result of this conversation.

5 Voting

When it comes to voting for the best idea generated by your team, this too should be anonymous.

“Converging can be accomplished by asking participants to put a checkmark or star by their favourite three to five ideas, depending on how many “top picks” you want to end with and how many people are in the room.” – BDC.

After the ideas are evaluated through a vote, you and your team will have a better understanding of how to proceed and achieve your end goal.

Next Steps

As a wrap-up, you should explain the next steps and what will happen with your team’s ideas. As the meeting facilitator, you might need some time to process the ideas or bring them together into a finalized decision. Make sure to let participants know when they can expect to hear back from you.

As always, we suggest creating a list of action items at the bottom of your meeting agenda. This will ensure that everyone on the team is held accountable for what they said they would do during and will be an easy way to remember the deadlines and next steps that came out of your brainstorming meeting.

Here’s a summary of the five items that you should include in your brainstorming meeting agenda:

1. Meeting goal: Define the problem you’re trying to solve.
2. Ground rules: Lay down rules to keep everyone focused.
3. Prompts: Come up with questions to spark your team’s creativity.
4. Brainstorming: Ask people to contribute their ideas anonymously.
5. Voting: Have the group vote for their favorite ideas.