Brainstorming Ground Rules
Brainstorming Ground RulesIf you want to have a really productive ideating session with the members of your team in your workplace, then you must absolutely adhere to brainstorming ground rules. Not obeying these rules could lead to a chaotic situation which could actually be counterproductive to the issue at hand rather than bringing out any solutions. Being the speaker, you need to put your leadership into play and use the following brainstorming ground rules whenever you are trying to bring out innovation techniques from your team:- 1. Set the rules for criticizing other participants. You may welcome criticism or not, or you may have a particular time for criticism. That depends on how you wish to conduct your session. Introduce all first time participants to the professional ones so that the ice is broken between them. 2. Explain the main problem to the group. It is an important rule to keep the problem precise, and always in a single succinct question. Like, "What color combination must be used in our new toy product?" 3. Invite everyone to give their own idea on the topic. You need to have a person to record the ideas that come in. The first few minutes would be only to welcome the ideas. Make sure not to improve upon them at this point. 4. When the ideas have stopped coming in, start discussions on each of them. Consider each idea before deciding whether you have to retain them or chuck them out. If any idea turns out to be analogous to another, keep just one. All ideas that do not seem practical must be rejected. 5. Read out the remaining ideas and prioritize them. Have another round of discussions where the list will be narrowed down further. Ask the recorder to record this progressive narrowing down of ideas separately so that you know later on which ideas were brought forth but were rejected. It will become important for you to know at what stage the idea was rejected and for what reason. 6. When you have only a few ideas left, which are the result of discussions within the group members and rejecting ideas that did not seem concrete, you can rank them in their order of relevancy. If ranking becomes too difficult, you can put them to vote. Ask the group members to vote upon these ideas and then rank them in the order of votes they get. However, this is not your final practical solution. 7. The real creativity comes in considering these ranked results. Put the winning idea forward for a debate among the members. Let them discuss the positive and negative points of it. At this stage, you will know how concrete the idea really is. If the idea has several more pros than cons, then you can keep it. Or, you can check out the runner up idea. Again put this to a debate and check out how it stands the discussion. These discussions are more important than the voting process because this is where you are getting a group view of things, and not just singular opinions. Of course, it is important to lay some ethical rules too, such as polite talk, no downplaying of any idea that comes in, being congenial but assertive, etc. Make your brainstorming session as interesting as possible with appropriate brainstorming ground rules, but make sure that the talk is really meaningful and constructive. |