Brain storming!

What does it mean to brain storm and how does it help, especially as a group?

Well that is what we will be attempting to, brainstorm about this week funnily enough. I personally like collaborating with a group and going in short intense thinking sessions with random ideas. I will elaborate, so that it makes more sense as to why it's effective.

So firstly what does it mean? Do you just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind? Well actually yes! You definitely can! Many do, however you can also write those thoughts down on paper, usually a less distracting way to do that. You can also probably have a theme or motif in mind when you do it, so you're not just writing down complete none-sense strings of words on paper.

I have also been in sessions where the group is broken into smaller groups to tackle specific sub-themes for an idea; for example "We need to brain storm new ideas for our food company" "let's break into three teams, one for the name, one for the logo, and one for what food we will actually make" That way, there's more targeted ideas and it flows better when it's brought back together.

I would then suggest that after the 10-15 minute session is over that the group votes on the crème-de-la-crème of the ideas thrown out there. Yes yes, you're all special and your mothers think you're all very bright. It's just that sometimes when we are put on the spot, we don't always poop gold. So this way the ideas that are left after the purge are the strongest and most liked by the group as a whole, which correlates to it probably being better received by the populace.

And that's really it, you can refine this and continue going through it until you find something better, but to me personally, there's only soo many helpful thoughts one can have, it becomes to critical and you might lose sight on what makes an idea good.

V/R,

Peter J Stefanov

Student, CIAT