Brainstorming has earned a difficult image recently, and sometimes this is justified. Gather a group of people together, tell them to come up with new and awesome ideas, and you can pretty much guarantee that the one thing that won’t happen will be the generation of new and awesome ideas.

Image Credit

What can you do?

It may seem counterintuitive at best, but many groups find it much easier to generate questions than ideas. It’s an approach being advocated by many leading companies and organisations including Microsoft, MIT and others. The principle behind this is that imagining questions about a topic can help your team to better examine that topic and the issues and ideas surrounding it in detail – often more effectively than a traditional brainstorming exercise would enable them to do.

How does it work?

You can apply the basic principle of so-called “question storming” by following a …