Brainstorming Methods

Poll

	|   |

Author:
Colin Bates

Brainstorming is a much used, and much abused process. "Let's have a brainstorming session" someone says, and before there are 4-5 ideas out on the table everyone is arguing about the merits of each, evaluating and judging every comment made.
It drives us mad, and it should drive you mad too. That's because there are fundamentally two different types of thinking:
The first is 'divergent', creative, imaginative, playful, fun and great for generating ideas.
The second is 'convergent' analytical, judgmental and a terrible basis for generating ideas (but good, of course, for evaluating ideas).
The point is that you can't do both at them same time. Brainstorming is about 'divergent' thinking. It is about being creative, playful, imaginative and having fun, while generating LOTS of ideas very quickly. After you have finished the brainstorming, and after you have 'cooled down' you can put your analytical hat on and evaluate the ideas.
During a brainstorming session the basic ground rules should be:
Don't criticize
Don't interpret
Do build on others ideas
Do be creative
Sounds simple doesn't it!

BuildingBrands offers practical marketing 'know how' for business owners and managers. Whether you are a one-man start-up, or already running a medium-sized company, BuildingBrands can help you unlock your potential.
http://www.buildingbrands.com

A Quick Note From The Publisher... If you like the article above, you may be interested in the following article which is also related to Brainpower... Live Brainstorming Session In Berlin a restaurant opens for anorexics and in Buffalo a lawyer with a stutter wins a court case. When everything you're working on has gone stale and your own initially promising concepts are starting to annoy you, you need a brainstorming session to get to the missing bits or new ideas. The papers provide ample ideas for jump starts. A stutterer in a court case or an anorexic going to a restaurant that has opened especially for them must have no problems with ideas to keep them going for at least two weeks after their memorable experiences. Brainstorming is trix galore, right? Really, you're doing nothing new. Our mind plays on us all the time, wherever we are, whatever we do. It thinks of a stutter as its rightful body. Or of the numb anorexic craving as its self in top form. The mind's always on a mission. Always. When faced with putting together a magazine-type product, a sales promotion concept, a new hype of some sort. It's the mind, that comes up with everything. When brainstorming, think of the stutterer. At all cost, do NOT work on losing the stutter if you wanna speak. It's only obstructing and keeping you from the ideas labeled 'good' in the recesses you're trying to access. Material to work with? Anything, so long as it is not defined. Space for now. Goal to achieve? An arrival point. Very often the best ideas are the ones born in the early seconds of a session. Here at contentClix, we call it 'performance brainstorming'. Trust your instinct rather than the treacherous mind and your first utterances prove most valuable. What DO we get at when we get at what we normally miss out on? And DO we miss out? Or does what we can't afford to miss out on catch up with us anyway? Days that we are opening restaurants for anorexix are here. Really,...