Help! My boss wants to hold a brainstorming session! 🙄
Don’t worry, death by Post-It is not inevitable! You are not condemned to endure a session in which you have to come up with something just to pretend you’re inspired…
Depending on how you think, it can sometimes be difficult to get an idea down on a piece of paper. And not everyone can react and be inspired at the same speed.
Also, very often, brainstorming is biased because we’re focused on the solution (which everyone thinks they have, but if it were that obvious, it would have been done a long time ago!) We often don’t leave much room for exploration, which for me is the whole point of the exercise and what leads to quality results… If we’re going to invest time as a team, we might as well get something useful and novel out of it!
My role as a facilitator of brainstorming sessions is to prepare these sessions well in advance, with tailor-made exercises, so that the participants are placed in the right conditions to generate ideas. It’s all about creating the conditions for freeing the brains in the room and working in an energetic and fun way. Brain nectar has to be collected with care!
Brainstorming is really about exploring the subject in depth and in complete freedom: getting to the heart of the matter, finding ideas that are more unexpected, surprising, even challenging. It’s from this richness that we can formulate pragmatic yet innovative solutions.
So what do you think? Do you fancy being reconciled with brainstorming?