Quick Brainstorming Activities for Busy Managers

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ISBN: 978-0-8144-1793-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, Brian Cole

    Quick brainstorming activities for busy managers: 50 exercises to spark your team’s creativity and get results fast / Brian Cole Miller.

        p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8144-1792-8

ISBN-10: 0-8144-1792-2

1. Creative ability in business. 2. Teams in the workplace. I. Title.

HD53.M548 2012

658.4′022—dc23

2011025999

© 2012 Brian Cole Miller.

All rights reserved.

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: BRAINSTORMING

What Is Brainstorming?

Why Use Brainstorming?

What Are the Basic Rules of Brainstorming?

How Is a Brainstorming Session Conducted?

What Could Go Wrong?

Summary

CHAPTER 2: IT ALL STARTS WITH A QUESTION

Use Focus Questions to Kick Off a Successful Brainstorming Session

Using Focus Questions for Idea Generation

A Final Note About Focus Questions

Keep the Ideas Flowing After the Focus Question

Putting It All Together

Summary

CHAPTER 3: THE POWER OF THE PEN

The Four Rules of Recording Brainstorming Sessions

Summary

CHAPTER 4: BRAINSTORMING TECHNIQUES

Traditional Brainstorming

Stickies

Bubbles

Chips

Grids

Last One Standing

Mind Maps

Paper Swap

Plus One

Round Robin

Silent Brainstorm

Taking Turns

CHAPTER 5: CREATIVITY EXERCISES

Associations

Brainstorm Bash

Mega-Doodles

Exaggerations

Forced Conflict

Free Writing

Jeopardy

Let’s Get Physical

Mind Reader

Objects

Pictures

Reverse Brainstorming

Roles

Six Perspectives

Stop and Start

Storytellers

Web Surfing

CHAPTER 6: GROUPING METHODS

Alphabet Categories

Card Sort

Leaderless

Quick Sort

Symbols

CHAPTER 7: PRIORITIZATION PROCESSES

Balloons

Dots

Grid-Based Decision

Investing in Ideas

Ranked Pairs

Pros and Cons

Rotating Charts

Seven

Sudden Death

Thumbs-Up Consensus

Weighted Scores

CHECKLISTS

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the many friends and colleagues who gave me encouragement for this book, as well as some great activities. This includes you Jim Fograscher, Terry Hildebrandt, Tony Lipscomb, Roshan Massey, Alejandro Rodriguez, Leigh Ann Rogers, and Scott Shaffer.

Special thank you to Mark Hansen of sparkspace in Columbus, Ohio. Your work in getting folks creative is wonderful. Thanks for sharing your techniques so freely.

Another special thank you to Michael Wilkinson of Leadership Strategies in Atlanta. Your approach to putting structure and discipline to facilitation is fantastic. Thanks for letting me use some of the brainstorming and prioritizing activities you developed.

Thank you Christina Parisi and your colleagues at AMACOM for keeping me on track, and for being patient with me when I dragged my feet.

Thank you Debbie Posner, who cleaned up my writing so well, it actually makes sense to readers now, and thanks to Mike Sivilli, who shepherded the manuscript through to finished product.

Thank you Ed Buns for the great artwork. A picture is worth 1,000 words, and your work helped save me a lot of 1,000-words’s.

Thank you Martin and David for letting me do much of my creative work at your lovely cottage in Ireland. Makes me want to write another book just so I can go back!

Thank you family—Heidee, Benjamin, Logan, Roger, Theresa, and Tina—for your ongoing support as I wrote and rewrote.

As always, thank you Tim, for the most constant and faithful support I could ever hope for.

INTRODUCTION

This book is for the busy manager who uses brainstorming as a tool to gather input and ideas from his or her staff. Here’s what you can expect:

Each activity takes less than 15 minutes. Brainstorming is a quick process. Part of the success comes from the tight time limits you will impose on the session. You can get great results in minimal time. There’s no need to linger on a topic until you’ve squeezed every last idea out of the group. Use these activities and the best ideas will flow quickly.

Each activity can be done with only a few basic materials. Most of these are things that your organization already has on hand: flip charts, markers, index cards, pens, and paper. You will need a stopwatch, but you can probably use the one on your cell phone. Other than that, the rest of the activities’ supply lists include things that are not difficult to obtain: large sticky pads, balloons, magazines, and so on.

Each activity has a specific, focused purpose. Some are better for large groups, some for small groups. Some draw out quieter participants. Some are competitive. Some are faster paced than others. You can pick and choose which activities you use based on the needs of your group.

Each activity can be run by you, the busy manager. They are simple to understand and easy to plan and prepare for. Some of them can even be done successfully just moments after you read them for the first time. You take this book to your meeting and use a brainstorming activity right then and there!

The outline of each activity is easy to follow. Each one is presented in the same easy-to-read bulleted format:

This is … explains very briefly what the activity is.

What it does … tells the benefits of the activity and what it will help you accomplish, but it also includes a word of caution about a potential downside of using the activity.

What you need … tells you everything you’ll need for the activity. Usually, it’s nothing more than a marker and some flip chart paper, or a stack of index cards!

Here’s how … tells you, step-by-step, how to conduct the activity.

For example … gives examples of things to use and/or shows how the activity may play out, so you get a good sense of what to expect. Often, there is an illustration at the end of the activity to show you how it will look on the chart or in the room when you are finished.

Tips for success … includes pointers and cautions that will help you run the activity more effectively.

Try these variations … offers variations on the activity that may slow it down, speed it up, expand or contract the scope, add a level of competition, or otherwise alter it for a slightly different brainstorming experience.

Relax, you won’t find any of these kinds of activities here:

No touchy-feely activities in which participants have to touch each other a lot, or share personal thoughts or feelings with one another.

No outdoor activities that require large areas, nice weather, and physically fit participants.

No special handouts to prepare, copy, or distribute.

No lengthy activities during which more time is spent explaining the rules or warming the group up. Each activity takes about 15 minutes or less!

Before we get to the activities, though, there are three chapters that will help you be successful in any brainstorming session.

The first chapter explains what brainstorming is. It gives a brief history of brainstorming and some of the most common reasons for using it. You’ll learn the four basic rules for brainstorming and why each is so important: focus on quantity not quality; don’t allow criticism; encourage wild, outlandish ideas; combine ideas for more ideas. Then we’ll look at the 10 steps of conducting a brainstorming session—from the planning and preparation, through implementation, and on to action planning for the future. Lastly, we’ll take a look at the most common problems that arise in brainstorming sessions. We will consider ways to prevent them from happening in the first place, but we will also discuss what to do if they happen in spite of your best efforts.

In Chapter 2, we learn how to ask a great starting question to kick off the group’s brainstorming. This first question focuses the group’s energy and leads them to their own great responses. So it’s got to be good, and it will be if you use their language, make it personal for them, keep it within scope, and use imagery to evoke responses. Once they start contributing, there are three ways to keep the energy high and the ideas flowing: using prompts, playback, and helping if necessary. We explore each of these techniques in detail in Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 looks at how to record your participants’ responses. There is great power in the pen—you can make or break your brainstorming session just by what you record, or how you record your participants’ input. You’ll learn how to follow the four rules of recording: keep it moving, keep it theirs, keep it legible, and keep it organized.

Each of the first three chapters ends with a brief summary, and then a checklist that you can use to gauge how well you are applying the principles contained therein.

With these basics, you’ll be ready for the brainstorming activities. There are four kinds of activities in this book, presented in four different chapters.

Chapter 4 includes a dozen activities for brainstorming, including the original, traditional method developed by Alex Osborn, the father of brainstorming. Each of the other activities has a slightly different focus or objective, so use them as your needs vary. Sometimes, the creativity of a group needs to be primed. For that, you can use the activities in Chapter 5 in tandem with the activities here.

Chapter 5 has almost 20 activities for encouraging more creativity from your participants during brainstorming. You may combine one of these exercises with an activity from Chapter 4. The activity from Chapter 4 gives the framework—the structure—to the brainstorming session, while the exercise from Chapter 5 will promote creativity from the participants as they use that structure.

Chapter 6 has several methods for categorizing or grouping the list of input your group will generate using the activities in Chapters 4 and 5. Often the list is so long that the participants need to group the input before they can even try to use the data meaningfully. These activities will help you do just that. This is an interim step for the group—after the list is generated, and before the data is analyzed and put to use.

Finally, Chapter 7 presents several processes for prioritizing the list generated earlier. This may mean ranking the ideas, or deciding