Drowning In Ideas

Drowning in Ideas? Here’s how to get even more

You’re done. You’ve been brainstorming all morning; the white board is full and everyone has glazed over. Its time to move on to the next phase… right? Wrong.

Everyone gets its wrong all the time with brainstorming. The session doesn’t start when you walk into the room with the poor souls selected for this exercise. It begins when you get the email.

You want the brainstorm to be effective. You need impact, you need efficiency, and you need market leading creativity. Let’s face it, No-one has the time to waste coming up with the same boring options. Its demotivating, boring and a terrible waste of productivity. Plus, it very rarely results in anything actionable.

Good ideas lead to actionable plans and real results in implementation.

So instead of wasting your and your team’s time, do this:

Instruct the team to brainstorm alone before they attend the session.

Get them to take notes of everything they can think of inline with the topic. For example: we need to brainstorm a new marketing campaign for one of our fashion product lines that is falling behind the competition.

They must immediately create a list of the first ideas that pop into your head and keep writing ideas down for at least 2 minutes.

And then they should email those lists to you

These first ideas will look a lot like the ideas that everyone else in the session is going to have. Your job is to go deeper, to push past the low-hanging fruit and to dare to go where no-one has yet gone before.

Form these lists, you can summarise the most repeated ideas, the most obvious and least interesting. You can also extract the most promising

And then… then the real brainstorming can start.

Now, the ice is broken and we MUST push beyond the obvious, the comfortable and the known to discover good, new ideas.

It’s not that we need many ideas to figure out good solutions to our problems. Its that, until we spend enough time thinking about it, our ideas are often too generic, pattern based, familiar, safe and probably been done before.

In this Ideation phase of problem solving, the challenge is to go as long and as deep as you can. Only once we push beyond the comfort zone of the known do we encounter the magic.

And now: Develop

This is critical before you start on the 3rd phase of Foursight Problem solving: Development. How can you evaluate and choose the best idea of they’re all mediocre? That is a sure-fire way to guarantee your implementation will fail.

So don’t be scared, brainstorm solo, sort and collect, then brainstorm as a team and think bigger and longer than you’ve ever thought before.

Curious how Foursight could save your team hours every week?

Book a quick discovery call HERE

Join the newsletter for more team problem solving hacks