Speaker 1: Do you need some group brainstorming techniques to find your next great idea? There is a lot of value in brainstorming with your workmates, and I have been doing this for a long time, and I'm going to share with you some of my tried and true techniques that have worked over and over again. Stay tuned to the end of this video, because I'm also going to be giving you a link to other things that are really critical in your brainstorming meeting. So stay tuned. Hi, if you're new here, welcome. My name is Adriana Girdler. I'm a business productivity specialist and a meeting facilitator pro. I have conducted many brainstorming sessions with my clients, and I'm going to share with you some of those techniques so you yourself can be a meeting facilitator pro too, before you start. Now, normally I go right into tips, but this is really important, and I want you to take note of this. There are a few things you need to consider before you even start your brainstorming session with your group. First and foremost, you need to have a team. You need to have meeting goals. Now, why is this so important is people need to know that you're having a brainstorming session and what exactly you're brainstorming, and so they can come mindset prepared. Because I promise you, a brainstorming session is different than a resolution session versus an efficiency session, et cetera. Invite the right people. Of course, we're going to be inviting those that are directly involved in the idea or the project, but you should also have in your session individuals who are not part of the idea or project, that have different thinking styles. Or even from different departments, because I promise you, they'll come up with other ideas that your group, who's going to be directly involved with it, would not have thought of, and that's really key to getting some really cool ideas in brainstorming sessions. Remember that brainstorming is about quantity, not quality. So when you're brainstorming, don't worry about perfection. I promise you, you can do that afterwards. You want to get as many ideas out there as possible and build upon them, because you're going to get something really cool, and that is important. Speaker 1. Another thing to do before you start is ensure you have a facilitator. So yes, you can hire a professional facilitator like myself, or you can designate someone within your organization to be the facilitator, but if you are a person who's going to be providing ideas, you can't facilitate and do ideas. So there's a lot to be said about hiring a professional facilitator who can guide you through this process. Start with some icebreakers. When you're brainstorming, you have to get people out of their head space of being in the box. Because guess what, when we're at work, sometimes we're so busy, we just want to get things done and we are in a box. But when you're brainstorming, you have to get out of that box. Icebreakers are a fantastic way of doing this, and do multiple ones so that you can get people warmed up and ready to go. Last but not least, before you start, you need to time it. That is time each exercise that you're doing, and really stick to this. Again, it's about quantity, not quality. So I keep on saying to people, dump, dump, dump, don't worry about perfection. You do have the clock ticking, A, it keeps you on track, but also forces people to dump because they need to produce. On that note, why don't we get to those exercises, those brainstorming exercises that are going to help you. Round Robin Brainstorming. This is a great brainstorming technique to really kick off your session with. Because what you're going to do is you're going to go around the room and everybody is going to build off of someone else's idea, and everyone's going to have a turn. So there's a couple of things here that's really important. 1. You want to get everybody into the groove. You don't want anyone to be left out. And when you're very clear, you can start directing people and challenge them to think a little bit differently. I've done this two ways. I've done it out loud where I said, okay, everybody, here's brainstorming this. The first thing, the next person, next person. But I've also done it quiet where we had a piece of paper because some people, depending on your group, may not like to speak up. They're just not comfortable yet. And so you can do it in paper and they can pass the paper to the next person. The key though, is once you've collected all that information. If people are speaking, you're going to be collecting on a flip chart paper. And if it's quiet, you're going to look at the paper, you're going to review it and talk about it as a group. Every brainstorming activity, you're always going to look and talk about what it is that you created at the end of that particular exercise. 2. The Charette Method. You use this method when you have multiple topics to brainstorm. You need to ensure that everybody's included in that process. You have a very short period of time in order to do it. So how you do this method? You have easels around the room, flip chart paper on an easel, and you have a topic on each one. So different topic. And you have, you break people out into teams. So this is usually when you have larger teams. You break them out into teams and you put them on a flip chart and they're supposed to do brainstorming around that particular topic. The key here though, is you then, after a period of time that you have delegated, let's say five minutes, you then have a move to the next easel with flip chart paper and they're to build off of those ideas. So it's really important as a facilitator, you tell people to write clearly and have detail because that's going to be important for those building off of other ideas. But this is a great way to get multiple brainstorming ideas out there when you have multiple topics with large groups. 5. WISE. Okay. My personal favorite as an efficiency person and with all the continuous improvement methodology I do, I use this one all the time. It is an excellent technique when you're trying to figure out root causes. What root cause to an issue? So if you have an issue and you want to brainstorm it, like, why is this happening? You do the five whys. Now what is the five whys? It's literally, here's my problem and you say, well, why is that happening? And you come up with a potential reason why? And then you ask the next why, why is that happening? So on and so forth. By the time you get to the fifth why, you're actually getting to the root cause of the problem. But I want you to make sure that it's a controllable root cause that you can put a solution in place to fix. Now, one of the quality checks we do is once you've done your five whys and you feel that you've come to the conclusion that yes, that's a controllable root cause, you can then work backwards by saying, here's my root cause because it's happened therefore, and you go back to the last why, you talk about that and this happens therefore, and you go back and it should get you to the issue. So that's just a QC, a quality check that you can do. Excellent technique. I promise you, if you have any issue, ask the five whys. And sometimes we say duck because people get pissed off when you keep on asking them why, why, why, why, why. But it works. I promise. Figure storming. Now, this is fun. It's just fun. What you do is you have your issue that you're trying to brainstorm or your idea, whatever it may be, and you pick certain famous people or characters or a combination of both. So you may want to have Trump, Oprah, the Pope, Superman, Batman, whatever it may be. And those are your headers. And then you divide people up into two. You divide them into teams and they go to that particular flip chart paper and an easel and they brainstorm based on that famous person or character, how they would probably answer the question. It's fun. And that's the whole point. Again, brainstorming is about quantity. So don't worry about the quality and what you get because you can always revise it afterwards. But some really fun, cool things happen. And why I really like this one is because it helps with creativity of letting go any preconceived notions. And I think that's one of the things that sometimes people have when they come into brainstorming sessions. Brainstorm competition. Now, I totally believe in having fun competition that is lighthearted. I don't believe pitting up people against each other because I don't think you get a lot of good ideas that way. So when we talk about competition and you have a large group, it's supposed to be fun and exciting to see what people come up with. And one way you do this that I have done many times very successfully is you divide your group into teams. Put each team on an easel with flip chart paper. Give them the idea and time it. Okay people, you have five minutes, ten minutes to come up with as many as you can. The key here, because it's a competition, you need a prize for the winner. And the winners are the ones that come up with the most ideas because again, this is about quantity, not quality. And interestingly enough, actually, we're really good at dumping ideas for the first 10 to 15, even 20. After that, it becomes difficult. So that the more they can do, the more ideas you're going to get to really build off of, to get your quality idea. Now what I've done for prizes, and it's really going to be up to you, your group, the people that you do, you can do what I like to do is I like to give away a million dollars. And that is with the scratch ticket, lottery ticket, which is always a lot of fun. People laugh at that. But if people don't want to do that, you can give candy, you can find something that's really inexpensive to really motivate people to say, here's the competition, get to it. Now that you have some tried and true, awesome group brainstorming techniques that you as a facilitator can use at your next brainstorming session, I promise you structure is key to be successful. I want you to go to the download below and pull this free meeting rules list. I use this all the time with all my clients at every workshop that I do, because it just lets everybody know what the expectation are. And that is critical if you're going to be successful. On that note, I want to thank you for hanging out and seeing this video. Please give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel and share it with all the colleagues that you know. That all being said, do you have any additional group brainstorming techniques that you would like to share with me? I would love to hear from you. Until then, that I should say, until the next video, see you later.