Brainstorming

“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”

Edward de Bono

Have you ever arranged for a team to attend a problem solving meeting or to come up with new ideas? What did you think of these sessions? Did it prove to be a waste of time? Were people frustrated that they could not express themselves? Did some people dominate the meeting with their ideas and personalities? Did you feel that the group had the potential to achieve a lot more, yet the meeting was highly unproductive because it had no structure? Ever wondered what you could do to systematically improve such meetings? This course aims to address that. It is applicable to all businesses and is ideal for anyone who wants to run a successful brainstorming session and get results.

The future belongs to the creative mind and those teams that can master the skill of creativity and come up with more interesting ideas in a given time are bound to be more successful than others. Fortunately, team creativity is a process. The right brainstorming techniques can significantly help to boost a team’s creative output.

Delegates will learn about best practice guidelines on running brainstorming events and how to go through the main six stages. They will learn about facilitation skills, idea generation and evaluation, prioritisation and decision making. Delegates will also learn about handling challenges and issues that are commonly observed when a diverse group of people want to work together to solve problems or come up with new ideas. The nature of creativity is explored in this course and it also includes details on specific tools used by the creative industry to help with brainstorming.

This package contains more than 20 brainstorming techniques provided as separate handouts. Delegates get to go through these techniques in simulated exercises to learn how to conduct them.

The main focus of this course is on brainstorming though ideally you should also consider the companion course Facilitation Skills to train delegates further on this skill.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

What is Brainstorming?

• What leads to creativity?
• What are best practice guidelines when running a brainstorming session?
• What is deliberate creativity?

Running a Brainstorming Event

• What are the six stages of a typical brainstorming session?
• How to warm-up participants before the main brainstorming event to fire up their creativity?
• What are various styles of thinking and how can this affect a brainstorming session?

Challenges to Brainstorming

• How can participants be challenging to the process of brainstorming?
• What strategies would help to handle such challenging behaviours?
• What is groupthink and how would you address it?
• How can you minimise negativity or being judged?

How to Be Creative

• Are you born creative?
• Can you learn creativity like a skill?
• What is lateral thinking?
• How can you become an idea machine?

Audience: Anyone who wants to facilitate a brainstorming session.

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate 

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Unleash people’s creativity by following established brainstorming guidelines
• Get a group of participants to go through the six stages of brainstorming while capitalising on each participant’s specific thinking style
• Identify common types of challenging behaviours while facilitating a brainstorming event and handle them accordingly
• Use a variety of methodologies to increase creativity systematically
• Learn about a series of established and popular brainstorming techniques

Conducting a brainstorming session is a very hands-on skill and as a result it is useful to practice running such sessions in a simulated setting. This course is primarily designed with this in mind and is slightly different from our standard courses. Several sessions are provided to inform the delegates on best practice guidelines, how to go through various stages and how to manage people. In addition to this, more than 20 brainstorming techniques are also provided. The collection also includes a few brainstorming technique we have already published on our site which are considered important to share with participants. By including them, you can find all the techniques in one place and with one format. This makes it is easy to provide them as handouts to your delegates. The package also includes many techniques that are unique to this course only and which have not been published on our site or in any of our other courses.

There are two time slots in the course where delegates get to go through simulated exercises to practice facilitating a group using a chosen brainstorming technique. Other delegates will roleplay as participants, learning the technique but also are giving an opportunity to see how it feels to go through the technique as a facilitator.

Overall, the course is heavily exercise-driven as this is the best way delegates can learn how to run a brainstorming meeting. Comprehensive instructions are provided on how to go through various parts of the course so delegates get the most from it.