Weekly inspiration #25: Brainstorming
source: Brainstore.com
Last Thursday, I was invited to Paris to participate to a workshop organized by our friends from Brainstore. Over the last 20 years, they have developed and standardized a creative process, which I was very impressed to see in action. Brainstore has created a real idea machine (see schema above), a system allowing to produce ideas industrially for almost any question you could ask.
On our side, we also earned a lot of expertise on organizing idea generation sessions for our clients over the past year. This way, we could come up with breakthrough concepts and strategies for a major European airport, for a multinational car manufacturer and for a German city. But methods for helping clients with the help of the Sandbox community should be the topic of a blog post of its own. Today, I want to focus on how we use brainstorming on a team level and on a weekly basis.
Brainstorming Friday
Together with the Zurich team, we made a habit of finishing the week with a brainstorming. Every Friday, another team member comes up with a topic and leads the session. Brainstorming like this helps us on different levels:
- motivation & team building: brainstorming is funny and puts everyone on a high energy level
- focus: turning an idea inside out helps us to see clearer what the essential is in it - and to focus on that
- idea creation: the main purpose of the brainstorming remains to come up with new ideas that we can apply to further develop Sandbox
How to get started
How we proceed: the brainstorming is divided into two parts: a warm-up and the brainstorming itself. For the first part, we use several techniques, for example someone takes an object (say a glass) and we try to find as many uses as possible for that object (drink, use it as a pen holder, grow a plant in it, etc). Or we use shapes (see example below) and give ideas about what they could mean (the circle could be an egg, a CD, a Mexican viewed from the top, etc).
During the brainstorming part, the one who has prepared it asks the questions one after another. People say everything that comes to their mind about the topic and when we are out of answers, the facilitator moves to the next question.
Challenges
There are several challenges to doing a good brainstorming and here are the key points:
- Define a theme which is not too narrow, but not too broad either
- Ask the good questions: it should be possible to answer a good question in 1-3 words, without using full sentences, otherwise it becomes a discussion
- Prepare the right setting: a big sheet of paper, a whiteboard, pens, etc.
- Don’t filter the answers: take down everything that is said
- Don’t criticize or laugh at others
- Try out different locations: at your office, in a café
- Try out different times of the day and pick the one that fits you best
- Manage time: if you want to keep the energy high, don’t spend too much time on each question, don’t wait that people have used all their possible ideas before moving to the next question
Try it out with us
Getting to a good brainstorming level requires exercise. If you want to try it out with us, let’s have an open brainstorming session this Friday. If you have ideas of themes we could brainstorm about with you or if you just want to participate, please comment below or just drop me a line: I’ll give you all the information you will need to participate wherever you are based.
Antoine is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Sandbox. He is currently sitting on an Easy Jet flight bringing him from Brussels to Switzerland and is preparing an exciting Sandbox week! Christian will be visiting from London from Friday to Tuesday.
On the 2. March 2010 at 11:29 o'Clock
Already received some email answers; don’t hesitate to join as well this Friday :-)