How to organize a brainstorming session?

We talk about it a lot brainstorming but in the end, I discover few companies or groups that really do it. Because of its fame, it is frequently mocked in “meetings where everyone shares all kinds of silly ideas meant to entertain the group.”

Brainstorming is what we refer to as a creative problem solving methodit is also used forinnovation. To achieve this, we need to establish a setting of chaos, a helpful chaos. The term brainstorming combines Brain (brain) and Storm (storm). Everyone has creative abilities, but they need to be triggered. This is why this chaos, this storm is present. The goal is to temporarily set aside your analytical mind and free your right brain to think “outside the box.».

Pascal Dubois, consultant in Creativity Management, describes creative potential in three points:

– Fluidity : ability to provide a certain number of ideas per minute
– Flexibility : Be able to bring ideas to various fields
– Originality : bring new ideas.

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First of all, you need a team. I’m not someone who likes large meetings while brainstorming. A team of four people seems more than enough to me, beyond that I think we lose efficiency. It is better if the team is trained in creativity techniques.

So, you need a animator. His role will be to collect ALL ideas, write them down carefully and restart the motivation and flow of ideas when necessary. It ensures that there are no dominants, that the discourse is well distributed, that the weakest voices are still heard. It will remind you of instructions if necessary.

It is still up to him to sniff out promising avenues, he must always be alert and have an excellent analytical mind. The length of a brainstorm varies. It all depends on the objective, number of participants, etc., but I will tend to dedicate at least half a day to it. Allow time to present the objective, to train participants who are not used to it, to remember the instructions, then purely creative time and time for analysis, grouping of ideas and filtering at the end of the session.

In addition to choosing people trained in creativity techniques, I would also recommend, when choosing a team, hiring people who know how to work together.

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A tyrannical superior will destroy all your good efforts. It is better to have people who have frank relationships, even if they don’t always agree, than people who don’t tell each other things clearly and who have more hypocritical relationships.

To cast as wide a network as possible, choose people who complement each other in their experience and area of ​​expertise.

The facilitator must also create a climate of trust to free ideas, even the craziest ones! Be careful though, this is not a competition for the most absurd idea, you are not obliged to bring only unrealizable ideas, they can be concrete, achievable and perfectly concrete. I say this because I have experienced meetings where members, misadvised by the facilitator, actually thought they had to throw out stupid ideas for it to work. Don’t hold back, whether your idea is crazy or not, share it! The Dreamstorm agency would create the following acronym DREAM :

• D for Delirium. All thoughts must be expressed, without any restrictions! We really need to completely free ourselves from the shackles of feasibility, achievability and reasonableness. To do this you need to forget about hierarchical relationships when brainstorming.
• R out of respect. All team members must be listened to. No one should dominate the session. No criticism should be made when announcing an idea, whether positive or negative. You will also have to free yourself from your analyzes and self-criticisms.
• And how you write. You have to write EVERYTHING!
• Such a partner. When brainstorming, it is interesting to use previous ideas to launch a new idea. It is the association of ideas that at first glance will make a completely eccentric contribution and perhaps give rise to your next success in the mind of one of the participants. The association of ideas can work by contiguity, similarity, contrast, exaggeration or sound.
• M for Massimo. You need as many ideas as possible. Don’t stop at twenty or fifty. You need to go further and aim for several hundred ideas in a 3/4 hour to an hour session. It’s a simple statistical analysis: the more ideas you have, the more likely you are to come up with the right one!

All positive things eventually finish. The conclusion of your brainstorming will happen when time runs out or when you run out of ideas.

To figure out which ideas to keep, there are several methods you can use: voting, pre-selection (removing all ideas that do not fit the criteria and eliminating duplicates, then focusing on the rest), grouping ideas, and more.

Next, evaluate the ideas that are genuinely impossible due to lack of resources or practicality. At this point, we do not focus on who suggested which idea, it is not important, it is the collaborative effort that creates a shared solution!

This piece is clearly just a starting point, the creativity methods and discussions around them are so many that one article cannot cover them all. Still, I hope it has captivated you and inspired you to explore further.