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Idea to Value - Creativity and Innovation with Nick Skillicorn


Feb 19, 2019

See all the research sources as well as tips on how to improve brainstorming effectiveness in the full article here: https://www.ideatovalue.com/inno/nickskillicorn/2019/02/the-single-best-way-to-improve-your-brainstorming-sessions/ 

You may have seen the four basic rules of brainstorming, taken from Alex Osborn's Applied Imagination:

The Four Rules of Brainstorming:

  1. Go for Quantity
  2. Withhold criticism
  3. Welcome wild ideas
  4. Combine and improve ideas

These rules themselves are not bad. In fact, in the hands of an effective facilitator, they can be very productive.

However, the issue lies with the way that brainstorming sessions are usually structured: as a group activity.

Significant amounts of research have proven that individuals working alone will produce a larger quantity of ideas, which are also of a higher quality.

As I outline in the episode here, the one thing you can do in order to quickly improve your brainstorming session performance is to give individuals time to write down their ideas first, before then coming together as a group to find commonality between everyone's ideas, assess the implications, and then refine and improve the best solutions.

This technique is called Brainwriting, and I've used it many times to help groups not only generate more ideas but allow teams with all sorts of individuals work more effectively together.

Bonus:

This episode was made possible by our premium innovation and creativity training. Take your innovation and creativity capabilities to the next level by investing in yourself now, at https://www.ideatovalue.com/ 

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