Brainstorming Process
The brainstorming process is one of the greatest things you can learn about in order to help your company or organization succeed. If you’ve been trying to solve things on your own, it can be a welcome relief when you invite people from varying backgrounds and degrees of experience to solve things with you. This method will lead to the facilitation of lateral thinking that you really need to succeed.
The great news is that the brainstorming process is not as difficult as you might think. You can easily implement this method as part of your business innovation plans right away. There is a step-by-step process to follow in the beginning, but you can definitely fine-tune it to fit your needs as you get more comfortable with it.
The first thing you’ll need to do is to gather members of your group who will have creative ideas. This might be everyone in the company or a select few that you trust to do some problem solving, innovation, and thinking. Try and make the group diverse so that you get a wide range of views and opinions that could really work for the problems that you’re trying to solve.
Then, you can start doing some mind mapping. Place the problem or topic in the very center. Discuss this out loud so that everyone knows where you’re going with this brainstorming process. Make sure that everyone understands that no idea is too “silly” to write down on paper. Also, this should be an environment that feels secure, so make sure no one is harsh about anyone else’s idea. Everyone will love that they’re getting a chance to take part!
As people start to understand the brainstorming process they will get more and more comfortable with sharing their ideas with you. Write them down as spokes coming out of the center of the mind map. This mind map will help everyone to see the ideas clearly. Ideas that are similar or were thought of as a result of a previous idea can be grouped together quite easily by using this method.
After a predetermined amount of time (a half hour perhaps), you should stop the brainstorming process and evaluate what you have. It is very likely that there are some winning ideas! Feel free to prune down the ideas if you and the group see some that are definitely not workable.
You can put the results up to a vote in order to see which idea is the most popular. It could be that you have a winning result! If not, you at least have some food for thought for a solution that can be determined at a later date. The brainstorming process makes this very possible and fun.
If you’ve never implemented the brainstorming process in your company or organization you should definitely give it a try. It is a cost and time effective way of running things, and also gives the group a sense of ownership about the problem at hand.
