Brainstorming as a state of mind

What is Group Brainstorming?

Brainstorming is when a group of people (of any age) meets to generate new ideas/concepts around a specific area of interest, such as a problem. Most brainstorming sessions’ main goal is to find a solution for a particular problem by gathering and sorting ideas. Another aspect of brainstorming is to use specific rules and techniques that encourage and spark new ideas that would never have come up under normal circumstances.

Why is it essential to use Group Brainstorming as an ideation technique?

A storm of ideas expressed from different perspectives can help you find suitable solutions to your existing problem/challenge. Those perspectives bring the team members’ diverse experiences into play for the same goal. By definition, brainstorming provides a free and open environment that encourages everyone to participate in an open-minded discussion. Unrealistic and unexpected ideas are more than welcome as they lead the way of thinking out of the box and encourage people to develop a rich array of creative solutions.

How can I Brainstorm effectively?

To use the group brainstorming session effectively, you can follow the steps given below:

1. Preparation: Set up a comfortable meeting environment for the session. Consider who will attend the meeting, include people from a wide range with various thinking styles for more unique ideas. Highlight to the team that there is no judgement.
2. Share the problem/challenge: Define the problem that you want to solve. Make it clear that the meeting’s objective is to generate as many ideas as possible and make sure that they will be written down at the end of the session post-it in blanc canvas or whenever stakeholders feel more comfortable.
3. Guide the discussion: Make sure that your team generates a good number of different ideas. They explore the individual idea in detail and apply some of them to see the effectiveness of your problem/challenge.
4. Action: After your group brainstorming session, you’ll have many ideas. However, it might seem hard to filter these ideas and find the best ones. An obvious solution here is to analyze the ideas with several existing tools and provide your team with the pros and cons of every idea to find the best ones via voting finally.

Which are the tools that I can use?

1. Post-it (Simple solution)
2. Venn diagram ((Simple solution)
3. Google Docs & Google Sheets (Simple solution)
4. Miro
5. Storm Board