Brainstorming
Training Exercises and Resources

This is a simple exercise designed to help the delegates see the positive aspects of their roles and organisation and define actions that can further boost the output of the organisation. This exercise is ideal for delegates that come from the same organisation. It can also be used in team building and leadership courses.

This is an entertaining exercise encouraging delegates to think on the spot, make decisions and self-organise to complete a task. It is ideal for teambuilding and leadership courses to show the value of communication from all members and how a leader can coordinate the activities and information exchange to significantly increase the performance of the group as a whole.

The purpose of this exercise is to help delegates understand the concept of crowd contagion. This is particularly applicable to business meetings where emotional comments can easily lead to a suboptimal meeting. Crowd contagion captures the idea that emotions are contagious and if not controlled come to dominate a group meeting. If one person becomes angry, others are likely to become angry soon as the emotion is passed from one person to the next.

This exercise aims to introduce an effective method for problem solving and brainstorming within teams. It demonstrates the efficiency of using other’s experiences and expertise in solving problems and dealing with challenging situations.

You can use this exercise to get a group of people practice brainstorming and participate in constructive discussions. Delegates will go through a case study which can be applicable to just about anyone while still creating complex challenges. This exercise is also flexible in the choice of brainstorming method used or alternatively you can leave it to the delegates to decide. For example, you can use this exercise after explaining a particular brainstorming method such as mind mapping, six hats, Delphi method, etc., and then evaluate the performance of the delegates based on what you have discussed in the course. This exercise is ideal if all delegates are from the same organisation, though you can also use it when delegates are not from the same place.

The purpose of this exercise is to get the delegates think creatively about the future of technology. Invariably, people are affected by technology and many great ideas originate from people who are not necessarily working on the technical aspects of a new domain, but those who might simply see a need for something and think why a particular service or product has not already been made.

This creativity process benefits companies to become more innovative as they can use all their staff’s brain pool to get creative ideas.

This exercise is by design rather general. Based on your own specific domain you can focus the exercise on specific topics.

In today’s competitive world, coming up with creative ideas sooner than your competitor can make all the difference between success and failure. However, creativity is not something that you can force people into or expect them to suddenly become creative by sheer will power.

Instead, creativity seems to be highly dependant on the state of your mind. It is about your brain. If you can provide a suitable environment for your brain, it can deliver many novel ideas rather quickly. On the other hand, a tired or stressed mind is almost useless for anything creative as if it can’t be set free.

Hence, to become creative you should simply focus on setting up your environment and adopt your behaviour in such a way to maximise your chances of success.

This article provides a series of guidelines you can use to become more creative.

When engaged in a brainstorming session on productivity, you want to maximise your search efficiency in order to systematically explore all areas and get the best from the time spend on the problem. A great way to do this is to expand and shrink the problem so you can come up with new ideas, get rid of the bad ideas and move forward.

Effectively, you can use the following 5 techniques:

• Expand. Expand the problem by thinking of new associations on all directions.
• Reduce. Reduce the scope.
• Reverse. Come up with something opposite to explore new avenues.
• Eliminate. Remove those ideas that don’t make any sense to reduce your search space and increase the efficiency of your brainstorming. After all, you can’t spend forever on this topic so you need to setup boundaries.

The following exercise helps the delegates to use this method.

This exercise encourages creativity and helps delegates to come up with a larger variety of solutions. The activity also enables participants to evaluate and compare the influence and effect of using expert views in solving problems. This activity is suitable for groups of people who have access to Internet and phone during the training session.