Synectics Brainstorming
Somewhat unconventional, the synectics brainstorming concept has still become quite popular in corporate workplaces around the world both as a source for getting ideas and as a teambuilding exercise. William Gordon devised this concept in 1961 and it is used, sans modification to this day. The main concept of this brainstorming technique is to pair together things that are conventionally considered to be different and then use analogies and metaphors to derive associations between them. The best benefit of these sessions is to help people improve in coming out of their preset mindsets and develop new ideas.
There are various online freeware tools that can help you create a template for a synectics brainstorming session among your own group of team workers. You can use these for anything, right from discussing on what is your business to how you can improve it for the better with innovative ideas and plans.
The following are the systematic steps if you plan to use a synectics brainstorming program in your team.
1. Begin by describing the topic. The topic is usually just one word such as PROFIT. 2. Now, you have to select another such word, which may at first seem to have no relation with the chosen word at all. Like, you may select the word COOKIES. 3. The team has now to analogize. They have to create associations with these two words. In reality, they have to come up with ideas on how PROFIT and COOKIES are similar in any way. You have to encourage them to come up with mental images to describe the associations they create. The more vivid the images, the better. 4. After the visualization, comes the expression. You have to let the people build personal analogies and think how it would be to be in the place of the topic that's being discussed with the particular idea. In our example, the personal analogy would be - How would it be to be PROFIT that is influenced by COOKIES? They have to create more personal analogies of their own. 5. The next step is to identify compressed conflicts. The people must come up with other word pairs from this list that seem to be contradicted to each other. 6. The participators will then vote on one of these points and choose one word pair that they think are conflicting. 7. Expand the scope of the topic by allowing the participators to create symbolism with this word pair and more ideas. They may begin linking PROFIT to TOYS, MOSQUITOES, WALLS, etc. 8. Come back to think on the original problem. Invite the participators to use the ideas they have generated to create something productive. They can use the descriptions that have emerged from the various associations of the original topics with the analogies you provided at the start as well as the various analogies that they developed along the way. Synectics brainstorming seems to be a complicated process, but once it is in use, it does not seem to be so. It helps people to think out the box and put into words what they would normally not have.
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