Do you need some group brainstorming techniques to find your next great idea?
There's a lot of value in brainstorming with your workmates, and I have been
doing this for a long time, and I'm going to share with you some of my
tried-and-true techniques that have worked over and over again. Stay tuned
to the end of this video because I'm also going to be giving you a link to
other things that are really critical in your brainstorming meeting, so stay tuned.
Hi if you're new here welcome, my name is Adriana Girdler, I'm a business
productivity specialist, and a meeting facilitator pro, I have conducted many
brainstorming sessions with my clients, and I'm going to share with you some of
those techniques, so you yourself can be a meeting facilitator pro too before you
start, now normally I go right into tips but this is really important, and I want
you to take note of this, there are a few things you need to consider before you
even start your brainstorming session with your group, first and foremost you
need to have meeting goals, now why is this so important is, people need to know
that you're having a brainstorming session, and what exactly you're
brainstorming in, so they can come mind-set prepared, because I promise you
a brainstorming session is different than a resolution session, versus an
efficiency session etc, invite the right people, of course we're going to be
inviting those that are directly involved in the idea or the project, but
you should also have in your session individuals who are not part of the idea
or project, that have different thinking styles, or even from different
departments, because I promise you, they'll come up with other ideas that
your group who's gonna be directly involved with it, would not have thought
of and that's really key to getting some really cool ideas and brainstorming
sessions, remember that brainstorming is about quantity not quality, so when
you're brainstorming, don't worry about perfection, I promise you, you can do that
afterwards, you want to get as many ideas out there as possible, and build upon
them, because you're going to get something really cool, and that is
important, another thing to do before you start is ensure you have a facilitator,
so yes you can hire professional facilitator like myself, or you can
designate someone within your organization to be the facilitator, but
if you are a person who's going to be providing ideas
you can't facilitate and do ideas, so there's a lot to be said about hiring
professional facilitator who can guide you through this process, start with some
icebreakers, when you're brainstorming you have to get people out of their
headspace of being in the box, because guess what, when we're at work sometimes
we're so busy we just want to get things done, and we are in a box, but when you're
brainstorming you have to get out of that box, icebreakers are a fantastic way
of doing this, and do multiple ones, so that you can get people warmed up and
ready to go, last but not least before you start you need to time it, that is
time each exercise that you're doing and really stick to this, again it's about
quantity not quality, so I keep on saying to people, dump dump dump, don't worry
about perfection, and when you do have the clock ticking, A, it keeps you on
track, but it also forces people to dump, because they need to produce, on that
note when we get to those exercises, those brainstorming exercises, they're
gonna help you round-robin brainstorming this is a great brainstorming technique
to really kick off your session with because what you're gonna do is, you're
gonna go around the room, and everybody is gonna build off of someone else's
idea, and everyone's gonna have a turn, so there's a couple of things here that's
really important, one you want to get everybody into the groove, you don't want
anyone to be left out, and when you're very clear, you can start directing
people and challenge them to think a little bit differently, I've done this
two ways, I've done it out loud where I said okay everybody here's brainstorming
this, the first thing, the next person, next person, but I've also done it quiet
where we had a piece of paper, because some people, depending on your group, may
not like to speak up, they're just not comfortable yet, and so you can do it on
paper and they can pass the paper to the next person, the key though, is once
you've collected all that information, if people are speaking, you're gonna be
collecting on a flipchart paper, and if it's quiet you're, gonna look at the
paper, you're gonna review it, and talk about it as a group, every brainstorming
activity you're always gonna look and talk about what it is that you created
at the end of that particular exercise, the Charette method, you use this method
when you have multiple topics to brainstorm, you need to ensure that
everybody is included in that process, you have a very short period of time in
order to do it, so how you do this method, is you have easels around
room, flipchart paper on an easel, and you have a topic on each one, so different
topic, and you have, you break people up into teams so this is usually when you
have larger teams, you break them out into teams, and you put them on a flip
chart, and they're supposed to do brainstorming around that particular
topic, the key here though, is you then, after a period of time, that you have
delegated, let's say five minutes, you then have them move to the next easel
with flip chart paper, and their to build off of those ideas, so it's really
important as a facilitator, you tell people to write clearly, and have detail,
because that's gonna be important for those building off of other ideas, but
this is a great way to get multiple brainstorming ideas out there, when you
have multiple topics, with large groups, five why's, okay my personal favorite as
an efficiency person, and with all the continuous improvement methodology I do
I use this one all the time, it is an excellent technique when you're trying
to figure out route cost to an issue, so if you have an issue you know to
brainstorm, it like why is this happening, you do the five why's, now what is the
five why's, it's literally here's my problem, and you say well why is that
happening, and you come up with a potential reason why, and then you ask
the next why, why is that happening, so on and so forth, by the time you get
to the fifth why, you're actually getting to the root cause of the problem, but I
want you to make sure that it's a controllable root cause, that you can put
a solution in place to fix, now one of the quality checks we do is, once you've
done your five whys and you feel that you've come to the conclusion that yes,
that's a controllable root cause, you can then work backwards by saying, here's my
root cause because this happened, therefore and you go back to the last why
you talked about that, and this happens therefore, and you go back, and it should
get you to the issues, so that's just a QC Equality check that you can do,
excellent technique I promise you if you have any issue ask the five whys, and
sometimes we say duck, because people get pissed off with you, when you keep on asking
them why, why, why, why, why but it works, I promise, figure storming, now this is fun,
it's just fun, what you do is, you have your issue
that you're trying to brainstorm, or your idea, whatever it may be, and you pick
certain famous people, or characters, or a combination of both, so you may want to
have Trump, Oprah, the Pope, Superman, Batman, whatever it may be, and those are
your headers, and then you divide people up into teams, and they go to that
particular flip chart paper in an easel, and they brainstorm based on that famous
person, or character, how they would probably answer the question, it's fun,
and that's the whole point, again, brainstorming is about quantity, so
don't worry about the quality, and what you get, because you can always revise it
afterwards, but some really fun cool things happen, and why I really like this
one is because it helps with creativity of letting go any preconceived notions
that sometimes people have when they come into brainstorming sessions,
brainstorm competition, now I totally believe in having fun competition that
is light-hearted, I don't believe pitting people against each other, because I
don't think you get a lot of good ideas that way, so when we talk about
competition and you have a large group, it's supposed to be fun and exciting to
see what people come up with, and one way you do this, that I have done many times
very successfully, is you divide your group into teams, put each team on an
easel with flip chart paper, give them the idea and time it, okay people you have
five minutes, ten minutes, to come up with as many as you can, the key here, because
it's a competition, you need a prize for the winner ,and the winners are the ones
that come up with the most ideas, because again, this is about quantity, not quality,
and interestingly enough, actually we're really good at dumping ideas for the
first 10 to 15 even 20, after that it becomes difficult, so that the more they
can do, the more ideas you're going to get to really build off of, to get your
quality, idea now what I've done for prizes, and it's really gonna be up to
you, your group, the people that you do, you can do, what I like to do is I'd like
to give away a million dollars, and that is with the scratch ticket lottery
ticket, which is always a lot of fun, people laugh at that, but if people don't
want to do that, you can give candy, you can find something that's really
inexpensive, to really motivate people to say, here's the competition, get
to it, now that you have some tried-and-true awesome group
brainstorming techniques that you, as a facilitator, can use at your next
brainstorming session, I promise you structure is key to be successful, I want
you to go to the download below, and pull this free meeting rules list, I use this
all the time with all my clients, and every workshop that I do, because it just
lets everybody know what the expectations are, and that is critical if you're gonna
be successful, on that note I want to thank you for hanging out and seeing
this video, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and share it
with all the colleagues that you know, that all being said, do you have any
additional group brainstorming techniques that you would like to share
with me, I would love to hear from you, until then, I should say until the
next video see you later.