Introduction

• General
  • Introduction
  • Definition

Topics

• Resources
• General

• Techniques
  • The bigger view
  • Change your character
  • Challenge current thinking
  • Confine the problem
  • Change the scene
  • Combining known ideas
  • Reverse thinking
  • Circumvent the issue
  • Lateral thinking
  • Logical approach
  • Aim for less
  • Multiple tools

• General principles
• Personnel and the meeting
• Prepare properly
• The meeting process
• The brainstorm process
• Simple example
• Managing the meeting process
• Assessing ideas
• Implementing ideas

The brainstorm process

The meeting can be directed in the following stepwise manner.
This can be adapted depending on what techniques you wish to use.

Stepwise procedure

Step 1

Make sure everyone is aware of the rules.
You may wish to write these out and display them where all can see.
In particular ‘no discussion’.

Step 2

Write down what issue or problem the group is trying to solve.
Again display visibly.

Step 3

Everyone begins to contribute ideas at a speed that the scribe can write down.
The scribe should not try to interpret the idea but write them down as given by the speaker.
The scribe should also contribute.
Methods for producing ideas could be:

• If you wish, firstly generate ideas as individuals, then group wise and back to individuals.
• Each group should have its own scribe.
• You could have a free-for-all in proposing ideas (may be difficult to control)
• Each member of the group could provide an idea in rotation, saying pass if none presents itself. The exercise could stop when everyone passes in a round.
• A predetermined number of ideas could be generated, for example, 20 or 100.

Step 4

Make sure that all of the ideas are recorded accurately and they are all visible.
The scribe should ask for verification of the idea from the person who generated it.
If using a flip chart then full sheets can be posted up on walls.

Step 5

The group (or third parties) should then give some time to think about the ideas so far.
This could be a short time or over a week for example.
Ideally, this would be completed before the end of the meeting so that some form of prioritisation can be given to them.
If the latter, there may be an opportunity to circulate the ideas to a wider audience.

Step 6

The ideas can then be evaluated in a structured manner using some or all of these techniques.

• Group the ideas under headings or themes.
• Then begin to examine each idea in turn.
• Constructively criticise the idea but not the person who proposed it.
• Highlight the best ideas in some fashion, for example, circle, use of highlighter, underline etc.
• Try to rank the ideas by some arbitrary measure, for example, a mark out of ten. Clearly, this is not an absolute science at this stage but it does show up those largely preferred over others. For example, 2 may have a lot more merit than 9. When this is done, review the prioritised list and eliminate any considered of low ranking at the first assessment. At this stage you may wish to identify the major solutions using a Pareto technique, that is, a few of the options will solve most of the problem, for example, implementing 3 out of 10 options may be expected to solve a large part of the problem.

Step 7

Having identified the ‘best’ solutions consider:

• Were there any weaknesses in the methods employed to reach these solutions?
• Are there any faults with the proposed solutions?
• Could the solution itself go wrong or add to problems in an other area?

Additional consideration of ideas:

Simple voting procedure

This is just what it sounds like.
Having grouped and reduced the ideas generated from brainstorming the group then vote for the ones they prefer.

This can take the form of each person voting as many times as they wish or one vote.
After the first round the ideas are reviewed and a further round of voting is used if necessary.

Ranking technique

Each person ranks each idea on the basis of 1 to 5.
When each person has finished ranking the ideas the scores for each idea are totalled.
The ideas can then be given a priority according to their scores.

Questioning the ideas

The usual rule is write everything down and don’t challenge anything at this time.
However, once the list is complete you may wish to try a small variation on this theme.
This may help to clarify some comments but will need careful handling.
You may wish to ask:

• Why would these scenarios happen?
• What might happen next?