For an effective brainstorming meeting, a few best practices are listed below:
- Send the invitation for the meeting early, with a clear agenda so that participants can come in with adequate preparation.
- The meeting venue should be well lit, well ventilated, comfortable and free from distractions. The informative team space is best suited to have abrainstorming meeting. Whiteboards and flip charts should be available and the participants should be able to access information and data that they would liketo referenceduring the meeting.
- Brainstorming works best with small co-located teams of size 5 to 10 people. The demographics of the participants should be diverse to make sure that stereotypes do not hinder creative thinking and different perspectives are presented and heard. The participants should welcome innovative and radical ideas.
- The meeting should be facilitated such that there is time keeping, participants stick to the agenda and everyone feels empowered to generate ideas, listen to each other and thus participate actively. The facilitator should steer away from any attempts at personal criticism or group thinking, which can quickly degenerate the purpose ofthe meeting.
- The meeting should end on a positive note with a feeling that the time has been well spent. The action items and the decisions that were discussed should be collated, prioritized and circulated to the participants as meeting minutes for future reference.
Some of the commonly used techniques used in brainstorming are:
- Drawing a mind map 思维导图– here the participants are asked to adopt different mindsets for predefined periods of time while contributing their ideas to a central mind map drawn. This helps in uncovering many perspectives and generating ideas that would otherwise have been missed.
- Quiet Writing 安静书写 – here the team members work on generating a list of ideas individually, thereby limiting bias, peer influence, or ‘herd mentality’.
- Round-Robin 循环法 – here everyone gets a chance to suggest their idea in turn.
- Free-for-all 自由讨论 – here the team members simply shout out their ideas.
- Nominal group technique – once ideas are generated anonymously, the groupis asked to vote and rank each idea. The vote can be made by a show of hands or‘thumbing’
- Flipchart
- Post-its
- Brainwriting 头脑写作
- Alphabet
- Grid
- Circle Brainstorming