When leaders ask their teams for ideas, it helps to clarify the boundaries you’re working within. How do you keep ideas reasonable without killing your team’s creativity?

When generating ideas, it helps to establish constraints. What reality do you want people to accept as they consider possibilities?

Do the laws of the universe still apply?

• Ignoring this can be a fun exercise to get creative juices flowing, but the ideas will have to brought to this universe eventually.

Is money no object?

• This can open people up to ideas they assumed wouldn’t fit in the budget. Then you can brainstorm on modifying the idea to lower its cost, or finding additional funding for an irresistible idea.

Do you have unlimited resources?

• What new opportunities seem possible if you could add new staff, different tools, additional skills to your team?

Is time irrelevant?

• Giving a constraint of days, months, or years can completely change the perception of what options are available.

The list could go on, but you get the idea. If the facilitator or leader isn’t explicit, everyone could have different expectations for what ideas are fair game versus off-limits. The worst part isn’t the off-target ideas they may propose. It’s the revolutionary, creative ideas that could spark innovation, but they withhold them because they think they’re outside the scope of the exercise.