At Progress Communications, we regularly organise internal workshops. One colleague from LVT Group, of which Progress is part, gave a presentation on time management; another covered the latest developments in social media. Recently, our colleague Mariëlle from events agency Eventive visited us to lead a brainstorming workshop. Brainstorming sounds simple: tap into your creative mind and put ideas on the table. But what happens when the ideas do not come?
Defining the problem is the first important step towards a successful brainstorm. The more concrete it is, the easier it becomes to develop good ideas. There are plenty of techniques to stimulate creative thinking, and they all begin with stepping outside familiar patterns. We start with warm-up exercises to get our creative minds going and agree not to reject any ideas. We avoid thinking in terms of ‘no’ or ‘that’s impossible’, and keep going even if we suspect an idea will lead nowhere. Mariëlle then explained the divergent phase, when we collect every idea that comes to mind — the ‘idea dump’. Once those initial ideas are out of the way, so they no longer block further thinking, we continue. In this session, we chose two creative brainstorming techniques to stretch our thinking further and break our usual habits.
In the next, convergent phase, we select a few ideas we consider particularly strong. We then develop the most popular ideas into a concrete concept. Finally, we compare the advantages and disadvantages. A good idea must be more than creative: it also needs to be sensible, useful and feasible.
Would you like to organise a brainstorming workshop for your company? Get in touch: we can provide expert guidance.
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