WOOF! Go Beyond Your Pet Ideas!
If your company runs brainstorming sessions, know this: too many of them have become veiled opportunities for people to trot out their pet ideas.
Because everyone is so ridiculously busy these days and real listening is at a premium, people use brainstorming sessions as a way to foist their pre-existing ideas on others.
And while this sometimes leads to results, it doesn't make best use of the opportunity a brainstorm session provides. The way around this phenomenon?
Give people a chance to express their pre-existing ideas at the beginning of a session. Clear the decks. Then use the rest of the time to explore the unknown. Woof! Woof!
High Velocity Brainstorming
Conducting Genius
Idea Champions
Comments
I agree entirely.
We call pet ideas "ghosts", because they have been haunting people's heads for years. (That actually works better in German than in English.)
Clearing the decks we refer to as a "Brain Purge". Only when participants have cleared their pre-existing notions from ther heads are they able to work on new ideas. Until they have been allowed to do so, they are preoccupied with their "ghosts".
Posted by: Graham_Horton ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](https://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/nav-commenters.gif)
at January 23, 2010 10:21 AM
Graham: I like "brain purge." Nice. We try to do it in a way that not only gets old ideas purged, but gets them honored and organized in some way. It all depends on how much time we have. If a session is 3 hours or more, we can do that. If not, we usually just make some time for people to express old ideas and be done with them for the time being.
Posted by: Mitch Ditkoff at January 23, 2010 11:25 AM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
