Brainstorming

What is brainstorming?

Brainstorming is a simple way of helping a group of people to generate new and unusual ideas. The process is actually split into two phrase: divergence and convergence. During the divergent phase everyone agrees to delay their judgement. In other words, all ideas will be treated as valid. During the convergent phrase, the participants use their judgement, but do so in a ‘positive’ manner – looking for what they like about the ideas, before finding flaws.

Why use this tool?

Brainstorming is appropriate whenever you need to generate a range of options that go beyond the immediately obvious set. Examples might include:

• All the places one could gain customer insights from
• Different ways to learn from competitors
• New ways to use emerging internet tools to support our customers
• Different ways to reward employees for knowledge capture.

Brainstorms can be organised very quickly, and require very little in the way of material. The instructions (below) describe one method, but the tool is actually very resilient and the basic principles can be applied in many different ways.

How to brainstorm

1. Agree who will facilitate the activity
2. Make sure everyone is aware of the basic guidelines (see below)
3. Ideally, give everyone sticky notes and pens, so that they can write their ideas down.
4. Write the problem on a flipchart – or piece of paper, if you don’t have a flipchart – so that everyone can see it all the time
5. Ask everyone if they understand the problem, and whether there is anything that needs clarification?  Deal with any information needs, if required.
6. Potentially, have a group discussion about the criteria that will be used for idea selection.
7. Ask everyone to start writing down their ideas – one per sticky note – and hand them to the facilitator, who then sticks them on the flipchart.  If there are no sticky notes, ask people to shout out their ideas – one at a time – and the facilitator can write them down.
8. When the group has finally run out of ideas, take the flipchart page(s) and ask the group to:
   1. Look for duplicates, and combine them
   2. Vote (by putting dots, check marks or some other symbol) on their favourite X ideas (the number is determined by the requirements of the situation), based upon the criteria that were identified in the previous step
   3. Pick the highest rated ideas and have the group discuss how the ideas would be implemented – typically this involves identifying the critical next steps.

Guidelines for brainstormingDivergent stage:

1. Defer Judgement
2. Go for quantity
3. Seek wild and unusual ideas
4. Combine and associate
5. Write everything down 

Convergent stage:

1. Improve ideas as you go
2. Use affirmative judgement
3. Be deliberate
4. Seek novelty
5. Check with your objectives

When to use ………… (and when not)

Useful when there is a need to generate a relatively large number of options or ideas.  It is not appropriate when a problem is known to have a single correct solution that requires careful analysis to determine. For example, brainstorming about possible solutions to a mathematical problem would probably be a poor use of time.

Where to use ………….

Can be used in almost any situation where a group (2 or more people) can find a space to work together. This can be as simple as a shared desk with some blank pieces of paper.