February 11, 2009

Individual and Group Brainstorming


Any one who wishes to perform a Brainstorming session should ‘Welcome Creativity’. I perceive the term creativity as a classmate of the term brainstorming; and this is true, because one should be creative in thinking in order to develop new ideas and indulge in brainstorming sessions.
Brainstorming is a useful and popular tool that you can use to develop creative and effective solutions to a problem. It is particularly helpful when you need to break out of stale, established patterns of thinking, so that you can develop new ways of looking at things. This can be when you need to develop new opportunities, where you want to improve the service that you offer, or when existing approaches just aren't giving you the results you want.
Used with your team, it helps you bring the experience of all team members into play during problem solving.
This increases the richness of solutions explored (meaning that you can find better solutions to the problems you face, and make better decisions.) It can also help you get buy in from team members for the solution chosen - after all, they have helped create that solution.
Individual Brainstorming
When you brainstorm on your own you will tend to produce a wider range of ideas than with group brainstorming - you do not have to worry about other people's egos or opinions, and can therefore be more freely creative. You may not, however, develop ideas as effectively as you do not have the experience of a group to help you.
When Brainstorming on your own, it can be helpful to use Mind Maps to arrange and develop ideas.
Group Brainstorming
Group brainstorming can be very effective as it uses the experience and creativity of all members of the group. When individual members reach their limit on an idea, another member's creativity and experience can take the idea to the next stage. Therefore, group brainstorming tends to develop ideas in more depth than individual brainstorming.
Brainstorming in a group can be risky for individuals. Valuable but strange suggestions may appear stupid at first sight. Because of this, you need to chair sessions tightly so that uncreative people do not crush these ideas and leave group members feeling humiliated.

Read more at: http://www.mindtools.com/brainstm.html

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