Guide to Facilitating Brainstorming Session

How to Facilitate Brainstorming Meeting with Project Teams or Groups in general (Intended for project/team leaders and improvement champions)

By Ranjit Roy

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Wikipedia defines brainstorming as “a group creativity technique designed to generate a large number of ideas for the solution to a problem”. The word “problem” in this case refers to a project with or without a definite objective. Regardless of the nature or the purpose, here area a attributes that are common to all brainstorming. A good facilitator must:Be Fair (Treat everyone equally).Be Objective (Use numeric data to decide things).Be Familiar with the technique (Required for technical issues only. See an example: http://nutek-us.com/wp-exptplanning.html . Steps you should follow are: 1: Form Team and schedule meeting (1, 2, 4 or 8 hours) – Do everything possible to secure commitment to participate from all members. 2: Define Purpose and Scopes – Start the meeting by explaining the purpose and if appropriate, agree on a title. State also the budget and time constraints for the project. 3: Conduct brainstorming – Use most of your allotted time to brainstorm with the group to capture and sort ideas. Follow the approach outlined below: Go for Long List of ideas – Seek out a quantity of ideas without worrying about quality or validity. List all ideas in a flipchart visible to all, no matter how good or bad the suggestion is. Make direct eye contact with participants and continue soliciting ideas until all ideas are exhausted. Order Qualified List of ideas – Validate ideas and list them in order of importance. To do so, take one idea at a time and check for validity and practicality. Now, rearrange the list in the DESCENDING ORDER OF IMPORTANCE by subjectively assigning a number (say between 0 – 10) to each idea that represents its importance. Let each team member do it for all ideas. Add all numbers assigned and relist ideas from most important to the lleast, using the totals. Identify Selected List of ideas – Depending on your capacity (budget and time); select a number of ideas from the top of the ordered list to evaluate and act on. Good luck and have happy brainstorming. - RKR 10/26/07 www.nutek-us.com

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Guide to Facilitating Brainstorming Session

How to Facilitate Brainstorming Meeting with Project Teams or Groups in general (Intended for project/team leaders and improvement champions)