Brainstorming Activities
You can bring a bunch of people in a room, have a flipchart, and a goal, but this doesn’t necessarily make a successful brainstorming session. If you want your brainstorming to be exciting, knock your socks off ideas being thrown across the room, then you need to give them a little bit of brainstorming training.
There are some brainstorming activities that can ‘prime the pump’ so to speak. Get them ready for the big show where they need to be ready to perform. This will give you more ideas and they will have done a test run basically, to be ready. I have one of them listed here. There are more than this, but at least you will have one to use now.
Brainstorming Activities
We all need routines to get through the day, we like to have our shortcuts to do things, and we need to be able to get through the days without thinking about each and every task we perform or step we take. Can you imagine if you wanted to go get a cup of coffee from the machine and you had to mentally go through every step each time? You would be totally exhausted at the end of each day, just by consciously thinking about every little thing you did. This is where our routine thinking takes over, we do things without really thinking about it. But, this also is the facilitation of boring, calculated thoughts. There is no room whatsoever for creative thinking.
1. Get a list of common words, like car, apple, light, fast, moon, etc…
2. Have your team write down the first opposite thought that comes to them regarding that word like boat, orange, dark, slow, sun….
3. The purpose here is to flush out the routine words, get those out and thrown away in their head.
4. Now they have to come up with 3 more opposites, but more extreme.
5. There will be similar words that will show up, but that’s ok, these will be the catalyst for even more opposite meaning words.
6. Keep the time limit to 10-15 minutes, keeping them focused.
Now time for the “real” brainstorming activities. You are going to write down your problem statement very simply and clearly. Now it is time to let those creative minds set free to come up with some new and very non-routine ideas to solve the problem.
