A Thought Leader Guest Post from Aja Fros of Zapier:

Better Brainstorming: The Most Effective Ways to Generate More Ideas

The hero is faced with a huge—potentially insurmountable—challenge.

A random event or object sparks their creativity, and suddenly they devise a brilliant solution to save the day.

As romantic as this narrative is, it’s also highly unrealistic. Most of us don’t spontaneously develop genius ideas. We have to put ourselves in the right conditions and work hard to think of ideas.

That’s where brainstorming comes in. Brainstorming helps us be innovative on demand—that is, when it works. It can also quickly be a waste of time discussing random ideas. If you want to generate great ideas, the key is to brainstorm effectively. Here's how.

The History of Brainstorming

As central as brainstorming feels to modern work culture, it’s actually relatively new. In 1948, advertising executive Alex Osborn published Your Creative Power, a book with a chapter on brainstorming or “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective,” as he defined it.

Osborn said his team used this technique to generate 87 ideas in 90 minutes. To help others take advantage of its creative power, he outlined four primary rules:

No negative feedback
Focus on quantity over quality
Use others’ ideas as launchpads
Encourage big thinking

Brainstorming was a huge hit. It’s become one of the most popular ways to come up with new ideas. But as anyone who’s ever sat through endless—and unproductive—brainstorming sessions knows, it can also be...