How to create a focus question for your brainstorming sessions

What you need

• Post-it Notes/papers and pens

• Your team

• Your project brief
  20 – 30 minutes

Introduction

Writing a good brief is as important as having a good creative process. It defines the goals, direction and problems to solve. If you or your team don't have the brief clear, the ideation process will be pointless.

Through our experience with this, we’ve written down a few tips that would hopefully help you to narrow your brief into a valid focus question. This tutorial will guide you to summarise your brief better and perfectly define your goals for the session.

Pro-tips

• It better be a question
  Questions are more suggestive than statements. Your brain will feel more motivated to solve a problem when it's an open-ended question and directly talks to you. For example, it's better to write up your problem such as, "How could we launch our new product?" than "Ideas to launch our new product".

• Make it concise
  Your focus question should be short and straightforward. Complicated sentences just makes things more difficult to process.

• One thing at a time
  Don't fall into the temptation of adding a lot of goals and details to your focus problem. It needs to tackle one thing at a time. If there are more elements, you need to consider, add them later when you have some ideas already generated.

  The more you focus on one specific goal, the more effective your ideas will be.

• Write it down
  You might feel like it's enough to say it out loud and check to see if everyone got it but sadly, nope. Always write the focus question on a Post-it Note or a piece of paper. Have it in front of you and your team for the whole session. Don't forget!

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