HOW DO I RUN A CREATIVE SESSION THAT ISN’T A BRAINSTORM?
https://behaviours.betterideasfaster.com/facilitating/

Behaviour 04 of 10 . Facilitating

Send people new material two weeks out. Open by picking up thoughts they have already had, never by asking who has an idea. Keep it to an hour or two. Then break, and come back days later, because that is where the connections get made.


THIS IS THE ONE THAT LOOKS LIKE A TECHNIQUE, AND ISN’T
Think, do, be. Facilitating looks like the most learnable of the ten. Agendas, timings, post-its, a way of standing. All of that is real and you can pick it up in a day.
What you cannot pick up in a day is being the person who can hold a room in not knowing. And the room can always tell.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN IT’S MISSING
Watch the facilitator during the first silence.
If they fill it, they have not got it. That silence is people thinking, which is the entire thing you booked the room for, and the urge to rescue it comes from the facilitator’s discomfort rather than the room’s.
The second tell is a session that ends with everyone agreeing. Agreement at the end of ninety minutes means the room found the first answer and stopped. A good session ends with three things that might work and a slight sense of being unfinished.

WHERE THIS CAME FROM
My first ever session, when I was starting out. I had never done one before.
In the room: the global head of people at Unilever, and colleagues of mine.
I did not know the process. I did not really know the brief. I did not know the people in the room. And I could not feel where we were going, because I did not know the vision.
It is the only time in my working life that I have wanted the floor to open up and take me.
And the worst of it was not the not knowing. It was this. I could feel people putting their trust in me, and I had no process, no story and no knowledge to hold me through it.

WHAT THAT ROOM ACTUALLY TAUGHT ME, EVENTUALLY
It took me years to understand what had gone wrong, and the answer turned out to be the thing I have spent the rest of my working life on.
I was not underprepared. I was unheld.
There was nothing in that room built to keep any of us inside the not knowing long enough for something good to turn up. No shape, no sequence, no story about where this was going. So the room did what rooms do when nothing is holding them. It went for the first answer. And so did I.
A facilitator’s job is not to run activities. It is to hold a room in not knowing for longer than it could manage on its own.
Everything I now teach about sessions is a form built to do that holding, so that it does not have to live in the nerve of one person standing at the front of the room. The prep does some of it. The sequence does some of it. The story of where we are going does most of it.
Twenty five years later I wrote a doctorate about exactly this. It is called Rushing to Become: How Story Holds a Person in the Unfinished, and the claim is that what keeps somebody inside an unfinished thing is narrative form, and that the holding can live in a form rather than only in a person.
I did not know any of that at Unilever. I just knew that nothing was holding me.

WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS
The room itself is costing you ideas. Diehl and Stroebe (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987) compared real brainstorming groups against nominal groups: the same number of people, working alone, ideas pooled afterwards. The real groups produced around 28 ideas. The people working alone produced around 74.5.
Roughly a third. And the main cause was not laziness or shyness. It was production blocking, the simple fact that in a group only one person can speak at a time, so everybody else is waiting, holding their thought, and losing it. When the researchers blocked individuals from speaking, their output fell to group levels.
And whoever speaks first narrows everybody else. Kohn and Smith (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2011) found that being exposed to other people’s ideas causes fixation. The number of ideas people produced stayed about the same, but the range collapsed. They dug deeper into the categories already on the table instead of opening new ones.
The fix in their data is almost comically simple. A five minute unrelated task, and afterwards people produced 86 per cent more ideas across 57 per cent more categories.
Read those two findings next to each other and the standard workshop looks like a machine for suppressing ideas. Put everyone in one room, let them speak one at a time, and let whatever gets said first set the boundaries for the next two hours.

WHAT TO DO ON MONDAY
Three parts, and the two you will be tempted to skip are the ones doing the work.
Prep. Send new stimulus two weeks out. Short enough that people actually engage with it: a film, a piece by somebody who knows, something from outside your industry. Never a fifty page deck. This is what gives them something to have already thought about, and Diehl and Stroebe is why it matters. Thinking that happens before the room is thinking that does not have to queue.
Meet. One to two hours, or a short series. Never a long day. Open by picking up thoughts people have already had, rather than asking who has an idea. Close on possible ideas, not on the idea.
Follow-up. A few days later, because sleeping on it is where the connections get made. Share everything, let people come back with builds, and make the builds visible to the whole group.
And if you take one thing from this page, take the silence. When it comes, let it run. It is the only part of the session where anything new is happening.
Facilitating is behaviour four of ten, and it sits with Designing and Leading in Module 3, Accelerating Creative Project Work.

SOURCES
Diehl, M., & Stroebe, W. (1987). Productivity loss in brainstorming groups: toward the solution of a riddle. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 497-509. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.53.3.497
Kohn, N., & Smith, S. M. (2011). Collaborative fixation: effects of others’ ideas on brainstorming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(3), 359-371. doi:10.1002/acp.1699
BIF source: Matt Hart on his first facilitated session. Prep, Meet, Follow-up from the BIF People Program Q and A. Doctorate: Rushing to Become: How Story Holds a Person in the Unfinished.

Written by Matt Hart . hello@betterideasfaster.com
published 2026-09-09 . last changed 2026-09-09