Profitable Brainstorming
Ideas are the lifeblood of an organisation.
Profitable Brainstorming Will Produce the Ideas that are the Lifeblood of Any Organisation
Without them, it will not develop and improve its products, services, and processes, but you can be sure that its competitors will! Such organisations will not survive for long.
Strangely, a good idea is no better than a bad idea unless it is implemented!
This is the crux of the matter.
Profitable Brainstorming to Make Things Happen
Things don’t just happen – people make things happen.
Survival is not obligatory – it’s up to you.
That’s why people are an organisation’s most important resource.
But like any resource, it is only useful if you can tap into it and put it to good use.
How much effort do you put into encouraging your people to come up with ideas and to follow them through to a successful implementation?
Best Use of Your People
You need to make the best use of your people and harness their natural creativity and genius.
They need to focus the power of their brain and apply the knowledge, expertise, and experience that is in their heads to address the challenges they face.
Unfortunately, this just doesn’t happen as often as we would like. While it may seem contradictory, people need a structure or process to follow in order to help them think critically and creatively. Brainstorming is one such approach.
Profitable Brainstorming Approach
Brainstorming is a proven group approach to generating ideas relating to a specific subject matter by allowing the participants to voice their ideas, no matter how strange, weird, far-fetched, or impossible they may seem.
This generates a large number of ideas in a short period and allows you to whittle down the ideas to those that warrant further analysis and possible implementation.
The Rules of Profitable Brainstorming are simple:
- Focus on the subject matter/challenge set
- Involve everyone present
- Encourage participants to freewheel and say what they think
- Do not criticise, comment on, or be dismissive of, participants and their ideas.
- Record, don’t discuss generated ideas
- Feed off of and expand on other people’s ideas
The rules may be simple but they will avoid disappointment with the brainstorming process in practice.
Why People Avoid Brainstorming
They expend time and effort contributing but the outcome doesn’t seem to warrant the effort, for any of the following reasons:
- They’re not listened to
- Their input wasn’t recorded or disappeared
- The logistics of the exercise were too great and the outcome was oversimplified
- The session deviated and did not address the subject matter.
- Often the same old ideas surface there is nothing new or different
- Nothing creative seems to appear
- Participants were not involved in the grouping and selection of the ideas
- The decision-making process is unclear
- The output bears little relationship to the input
- There is little consensus or ownership of the outcome
- Participants feel that they have been ‘used’
Profitable Brainstorming
Fundamental to the success of profitable brainstorming is that everyone involved understands the process and their roles and responsibilities within it. Such a process is as follows:
Start: Need for Ideas
Step 1: Identify the need for Brainstorming
Ensure that there is a specific need for Brainstorming and that Brainstorming is a valid approach to adopt. The outcome of the Brainstorming activity must serve an obvious purpose.
Step 2: Form a Brainstorming Group
Involve the right people and gain their commitment to becoming involved.
Step 3: Prepare for a Brainstorming session
Agree on the subject matter, time, venue, approach, roles, responsibilities, and required supporting resources.
Start thinking about the subject matter. Research, observe, take notes, and explore. Make sure thinking doesn’t just begin in the brainstorming session.
Step 4: Generate ideas
Discuss the subject matter to make sure that you are all clear on what it is about and its scope. Ideas need stimuli.
Use thought-provoking open questions.
- What works well?
- Where are the problem areas?
- Where are there opportunities for improvement?
- Who are the customers/stakeholders and what are they looking for?
- What are our competitors and world-class organisations doing?
- Is there anything that would make a major difference?
- What assumptions are we making and are they valid?
- If we achieved the end goal, what would we be doing/experiencing?
- How would we measure success?
- What would be measures of excellence?
- What are the significant trends?
- Can we use them to our advantage?
Step 5: Develop, group and prioritise ideas
Once the initial idea generation activity has ceased, the Brainstorming group should then review, develop, and group-related new ideas to aid analysis.
This allows the Brainstorming team to identify potential missing areas/gaps and provides the opportunity for further ideas and avenues of thought to be generated and developed. Ideas should then be prioritised based on the potential benefits that would result.
Where would you expend your limited resources to achieve the biggest return?
Step 6: Decide the Next Steps
Once the idea grouping session is complete, the brainstorming team can discuss what the next steps are.
First, move the prioritised ideas forward into the analysis and implementation stages.
Then decide who does what and when and assign actions accordingly.
Finish:
Prioritised ideas available for development and implementation
So there you have it. A simple process that complements the simple rules of profitable brainstorming. It ensures the identification of key ideas agreed upon and available for development.
The participants will also feel more positive about the outcome and will be more willing to become involved and contribute to future Brainstorming sessions.
However, the process described doesn’t prepare you for the hard work involved. Nor does it give you any indication of the logistics, skills, techniques, and tools required to successfully perform such activities. So what further help can we give you to better prepare you for Brainstorming sessions and generating ideas?
This article was contributed by Mind Genius.
Profitable Brainstorming
Impact Factory runs
Open Personal Development Courses
Tailored Creativity and Innovation Training
and personalised
One-to-One Brainstorming Skills Training
for anyone working with
Creativity and Innovation Issues
