Happy Brain Storming

How to organise a BRAINSTORMING session

"That's it. I am leaving!!"

"I am leaving right now and you can do whatever you want!", she screamed and SLAMMED the door behind her. I was standing next to the door and I was a bit shocked. I had three thoughts in my mind at that moment, when a fourth came flying in from the other end of the room as a whiteboard pen hit the door some centimeters away from my head. "We WON'T miss you!!", screamed the other girl, all red and clearly angry.

My thoughts were:

- This is not fun.

- This is what happens when you don't know how to organise a brainstorming session. - Why do some people have so big EGOS ???

- Watch out because a flying pen is coming your way and it is coming in FAST.

If we were LIVE on TV, some presenter would rub his moustache and would comment: " ... And this concludes our first brainstorming effort of the day, be sure not to miss the two girls crying in the toilet... We'll get back to you, right after the break. [ Smile and some more moustache rubbing ] ...". Well we were not on TV and fantasy plays funny tricks some times. Sigh... Flashback.

What is a brainstorming session??

Brainstorming techniques is a form of creative thinking popularized by Alex Faickney Osborn in the late 1930s. It is also a surefire way to produce many ideas when they are needed. It can also be a great ice breaker in teams if things go well or it can teach you excellent flying-pen-avoiding skills if things go bad.

You can find it in two basic flavours

a) Individual Brainstorming

b) Group Brainstorming

So how do you do it? First you set the problem you want to attack. You decide what would be a feasible solution for that problem so to know WHEN to stop. Now pick a paper or a white board and write a big background memo of the problem you want to attack. If this is a group session then make sure to choose CAREFULLY your participants. You want people that have skill-sets relevant to the problem, people that are team players and people that don't have huge EGOS. During the preparation of a group session this is probably one of the most important parts that can go terribly wrong.

As Sigmund Freud very nicely put it: "Working in teams, brings out the best and worst in people". Results have shown that the group should not be more than ten persons as then communication starts to deteriorate. If you manage to be exactly eleven you can drop the pens, get a ball and come play some football - soccer if you are one of those that don't use knives when you eat burgers ;-).

Make sure that the group is feeling free to express their opinions. If for example, the company is firing people then don't bother to do a brainstorming session because people will be afraid to speak their mind freely. Try group psychoanalysis instead. Choose someone as the session organiser. He is the one that will guide the conversation as if he was a journalist during an election TV panel. Optional: Find someone with a big fat moustache so he can rub it during the session. He must beenthusiastic and ready to put fires out, if people start criticizing other people's ideas or if they keep insisting on their ideas. As you probably have already understood my intelligent reader, he is the leader. And as all forms of leaders he is not there to command people but to guide them to bring out the BEST in them.

Free tip: The leader should keep his mouth shut because if not he will jeopardise the whole process. Once during a meeting, the boss said to us: "Now we should do some brainstorming..", and then he carried on for the next 20 minutes telling his own ideas. After he concluded his glorious monologue people didn't dare to raise their opinions from fear of coming at conflict with his ideas. The result was that many good ideas went down the drain. Flush...

Ideas harvesting or phase 1 - if you like uptight strict titles. During this phase people start verbalising their ideas and the session organiser is writing them on the board. An alternative way, very close to the individual brainstorming, is writing the ideas in small papers that every five minutes are collected and to be written on the board.

Remember: Here we aim for QUANTITY and not quality. The latter will come in the last phase of brainstorming. The wildest and craziest the ideas are, the better the session will be.

Remember redux: There is no place for criticism. If anyone during this phase of the session criticizes ANY idea, as crazy as it may be, he should be expelled from the session and tied to a chair to listen to Elton John non-stop for three hours. That will teach him a lesson.

Not so free tip: If you prefer to write the ideas individually on small papers then make sure that the papers are anonymous so people will focus only on the content and not on the person who produced them.

As you write down all the ideas on the board, you should organise them in a spider web manner. By writing the ideas like that, you help associations become more apparent: Two distinct ideas may be combined and bring out a new one that wasn't visible from the start. This form of representation reminds us of mind mapping. It is also a great way to facilitate things as most people are visual thinkers and thus prefer thinkspatially as opposed to the classical top to bottom listing way. For those that find this way a bit new age I say: Wake up my friend. The eighties are gone.

So now let's say that after one hour you can end this first phase. Go out and drink a coffee. Smoke a joint. Have sex with your illegal relationship on the photocopy machine.

Filter Ideas or phase 2 - if you get excited with men dressed in green.

You can now proceed to the filter phase which will be selecting the good ideas from the bad ones. Here you can criticize as much as you want. But remember that the reason you chose this session is to find something radical that people wouldn't normally think of.

Finally remember: Follow the rules of the game, if not don't call it brainstorm. The worst brainstorming sessions came from individuals that were following 'loosely' the above rules. Now, you have to know that individual brainstorming sessions are much more effective than team brainstorming sessions. This is known as the "Ringlemann effect" that dictates that the more people are working together, the more they will try to do less work individually.

According to Paul Paulus, individual brainstorming can bring more creative solutions than group brainstorming. For example, Paulus found that, on average, four individuals can discover four times the amount of information that a group of four can in the same amount of time. Paulus reached this conclusion after conducting more than 1,000 experiments. Even more by doing the brain harvesting method individually you get to catch two birds with one stone:

a) You take advantage of "The wisdom of the crowds" a crowd psychology phenomenon that dictates that people who try to find of a solution have greater chances of finding that solution, if they dont influence each other during the early phases of thinking.

b) You avoid Groupthink, a terrible phenomenon that arises in groups when people trying to avoid conflict try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During Groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. c

) I said three birds, no ?? What the heck, if I said two then I will not write about c. Having said all that we will know leave you to work happily and maybe organise your future brainstorming session. Have a look at a Google brainstorming session. And maybe the geek force be with you. Amen.