Brainstorming – Encouraging the ‘Gag Reflex’

“Every idea starts somewhere. There are no bad ideas – the only rule is to try to make the person next to you laugh” – Pixar Studios

Brainstorming – how to think outside the box

Pixar (creator of Toy Story, The Incredibles….etc) regularly runs ‘gag sessions’ to come up with new film ideas.

The goal of the ‘gag session’ can be very broad (e.g. the director feels that the 2nd Act needs more humour), or very targeted (e.g. thinking up 50 ways for a room full of pre-school toddlers to make a toy’s life hell) but either way, the point is to aid creativity.

‘Industrializing’ creativity is nothing new in Hollywood.

Walt Disney used to pay cash on the spot to the person with the session’s best joke, whilst Warner Brothers’ hosted ‘No No Meetings‘ in which people were forbidden from saying ‘No’ to any ideas.

How to implement ‘gag sessions’ for brainstorming

There are obvious benefits for businesses……but why does brainstorming so often fail in the corporate environment?

• You need the right sort of people – people who lack imagination or who are too shy and quiet will not contribute
• Brainstorming becomes too democratic – if everybody has a chance to speak, but also to object, then you won’t get anywhere
• Over-sized groups – if groups are too large there is a danger of ‘group think’ whereby people gravitate towards an idea just because it seems popular
• Organizational cultures – brainstorming tends not to work well where there is a strict hierarchy

So, to brainstorm think ‘GAG’:

• Group: smaller groups of people
• Action: to ‘think the unthinkable’ in a structured environment
• Goal: have a defined objective for the meeting

I’ll leave the last word to the guys at Pixar who seem to have brainstorming down to a ‘t’:

“Egos are checked at the door and most of the time nobody can recall the origin of a gag”