Is your team stuck in a creative rut? If your recent meetings have felt more like a chore than a hub of innovation, it might be time to rethink how you approach the drawing board.
True brainstorming isn't just about gathering in a conference room and asking for ideas. It is a structured process designed to break down social barriers, eliminate "groupthink," and extract innovative solutions from every member of your team—not just the loudest ones.
If you are looking to disrupt your standard operating procedure, here are five unconventional brainstorming tricks that successful startups use to get the creative juices flowing.
1. Get Out of the Building (Literally)
Environment dictates behavior. If you try to innovate in the same beige conference room where you hold your weekly status reports, you will likely get the same standard results.
Research shows that changing your physical environment stimulates neuroplasticity, helping the brain make new connections. This is why the best ideas often happen in the shower or on a walk—not at a desk.
The Fix: Take your team offsite. You don't need to fly to a ski lodge to get results (though that helps). Simply booking a coworking space, a creative studio, or a meeting room in a different part of the city can reset the team's energy.
Action Item: Use a platform like DropDesk to find a unique, on-demand meeting space for a half-day "Innovation Summit." A change of scenery is often all it takes to shift a mindset from "maintenance" to "growth."
2. Visualize the Chaos (The Whiteboard Method)
When we rely solely on verbal brainstorming, ideas evaporate as quickly as they are spoken. Visual brainstorming forces the brain to process information differently, allowing you to spot patterns and connections that verbal communication misses.
The Fix: Invest in massive whiteboards, glass walls, or butcher paper.
The "Brain-Writing" Technique: Give everyone a pad of sticky notes. Set a timer for 10 minutes. Everyone writes down as many ideas as possible—one idea per note—and sticks them on the wall.
The Benefit: This separates the generation of ideas from the judgment of ideas. It allows you to group similar concepts and physically move thoughts around until a solution forms.
3. Embrace Asynchronous Brainstorming (For the Introverts)
Lukas Biewald, co-founder of CrowdFlower, famously noted that traditional brainstorming often leads to "groupthink," where the team anchors on the first loud idea presented. Furthermore, your most brilliant engineers or creatives might be introverts who struggle to fight for airtime in a noisy room.
The Fix: Don't start with the meeting. Start with the email.
The Method: Send the prompt to your team 24 hours before the session. Ask them to email their top three ideas to you privately.
The Result: You enter the meeting with a curated list of anonymous ideas to discuss. This levels the playing field, ensuring the best idea wins, not just the loudest voice.
4. Gamify the Process: The "Hot Potato" Method
Creativity loves constraints. When people have too much time to think, their internal editor kicks in, and they talk themselves out of "risky" or "weird" ideas. To get to true innovation, you need to outrun that internal editor.
The Fix: Play "Hot Potato" with ideas.
The Game: Gather in a circle with a stress ball or beanbag. Toss it to a team member. They have 5 seconds to shout an idea related to the topic before tossing it to someone else.
The Goal: Speed over quality. By forcing rapid-fire responses, you bypass the fear of judgment. You'll generate 90% nonsense, but the 10% of gold you uncover will be ideas that never would have surfaced in a formal meeting.
5. Optimize for Physical Comfort
It sounds trivial, but physical discomfort is a creativity killer. If a team member is cold, sitting on a hard chair, or wearing a stiff suit, their brain is subconsciously focused on self-regulation, not innovation.
Innovator Gerald "Solutionman" Haman suggests a direct correlation between comfort and idea generation, noting that people often generate more ideas when they aren't wearing shoes.
The Fix: Relax the rules.
- Dress Code: Make your brainstorming day explicitly casual.
- Seating: Ditch the boardroom table. Use couches, bean bags, or stand-up discussions.
- Fuel: Provide high-quality food (not just donuts).
When the body is relaxed, the mind feels safe. And when the mind feels safe, it is willing to take the creative risks your startup needs to succeed.
Ready to find the perfect space for your next brainstorm?
Don't let a stale office kill your team's vibe. Browse unique venues for meetings and work near you on DropDesk.
Graham Beck
Graham Beck is the Co-founder and CEO of DropDesk, a platform dedicated to a singular, transformative mission: unlocking the potential of underutilized spaces to foster human connection.
