After the brainstorming session
Congratulations! You've had a successful brainstorming session and generated dozens of ideas. Now what?
First things first, the group must sift through the ideas and decide which ones are viable and which are not. While it might be tempting to do this at the same time as the brainstorming meeting, I've found it best to give people time to think about all the ideas before evaluating the list. There are a few reasons for this:
Let people be happy and celebrate the number of ideas that were generated. If you create the list and cut the list in the same session, participants might leave feeling that they didn't accomplish as much.
Terrible ideas will still be terrible ideas. There's no need to rush taking a terrible idea off the table. If it's not viable when generated in brainstorming, it will still not be viable a few days later when the group gets back together. In fact, it's possible that the person who originally suggested the idea will take it out of consideration...
