Simian Design

September 2, 2004

How to run a brainstorming meeting.

How to run a brainstorming meeting from UIWeb.com is great. It covers the different aspects and outcomes of a brainstorming meeting.

The most important thing about a brainstorming session is what happens after it ends.

He even address one of the aspects I’ve always somewhat held against “Creative Meetings” that I would marginally lump brainstorming in with (depending upon my mood.) You see, I don’t think that Creativity is a group event. Or a “social process” as he calls it. But, sometimes, it can help jump start something.

The way I look at it, raw ideas are great. Great, big gigantic ideas just fresh from the imagination are gold. And if you have a bunch of people just bouncing ideas around, you increase the chances of striking true gold. (true gold being slightly better than regular gold.) But I find this can rapidly get annoying and incredibly counter-productive once the focus moves from what we can do to what we have done.

There are some good ideas in there for things to do in a brainstorming session that look interesting. What is the opposite of what we want? is a good question. A real good start-off question.

Overall, it’s a real good, in-depth article that should help you make your next (or first) Brainstorming Meeting a rousing success.

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Tagged As Strategy

Comments are Open (3)

Posted at 10:23 PM

Comments

Jay

hehehe, just opened simian design up in a new tab (hooray for firefox) while i was reading that article. pretty intresting.
think i might even test some of it out this weekend (saturday is all-day-meeting-day yuck)

Posted by: Jay | September 3, 2004 05:04 AM

Tony

You have an all-day meeting on Saturday? That is pretty Not Good.

Is that a common affair at your company?

Posted by: Tony | September 3, 2004 06:55 AM

Jay

it wasn't for a company. I'm leader of a boy/girlscouts group and the first week in september we 'kickstart' the year by going on a weekend with all the leaders to evaluate the last year and plan the new year that starts at the end of sept.

if there was a beter way to do this, i'd try it, but i really cant think of any other way. There are a whole lot of things that need to be arranged, dates to be picked and responsibilities appointed.

It took us the better part of the day. 7 or 8 hours if i remember correctly (including 3 breaks) It is only now that i realize i should have kept time.(lessons learned)
Allthough -like i said i do not consider this to be a good way of handling things- i still think it went rather well this year. I had made a very clean and structured meeting-agenda for everybody, which i do believe makes a whole lot of difference.

If you got any idea's, thoughts or suggestions, send me a mail. I will allways try to improve the efficiency of these kind of meetings

Posted by: Jay | September 5, 2004 09:55 AM