Group Brainstorming Techniques [Types of Brainstorming that Work]

Do you need some group brainstorming techniques to find your next great idea? There's a lot of value in brainstorming with your workmates, and I have been doing this for a long time, and I'm going to share with you some of my tried-and-true techniques that have worked over and over again. Stay tuned to the end of this video because I'm also going to be giving you a link to other things that are really critical in your brainstorming meeting, so stay tuned. Hi if you're new here welcome, my name i

s Adriana Girdler, I'm a business productivity specialist, and a meeting facilitator pro, I have conducted many brainstorming sessions with my clients, and I'm going to share with you some of those techniques, so you yourself can be a meeting facilitator pro too before you start, now normally I go right into tips but this is really important, and I want you to take note of this, there are a few things you need to consider before you even start your brainstorming session with your group, first an

d foremost you need to have meeting goals, now why is this so important is, people need to know that you're having a brainstorming session, and what exactly you're brainstorming in, so they can come mind-set prepared, because I promise you a brainstorming session is different than a resolution session, versus an efficiency session etc, invite the right people, of course we're going to be inviting those that are directly involved in the idea or the project, but you should also have in your sessio

n individuals who are not part of the idea or project, that have different thinking styles, or even from different departments, because I promise you, they'll come up with other ideas that your group who's gonna be directly involved with it, would not have thought of and that's really key to getting some really cool ideas and brainstorming sessions, remember that brainstorming is about quantity not quality, so when you're brainstorming, don't worry about perfection, I promise you, you can do tha

t afterwards, you want to get as many ideas out there as possible, and build upon them, because you're going to get something really cool, and that is important, another thing to do before you start is ensure you have a facilitator, so yes you can hire professional facilitator like myself, or you can designate someone within your organization to be the facilitator, but if you are a person who's going to be providing ideas you can't facilitate and do ideas, so there's a lot to be said about hirin

g professional facilitator who can guide you through this process, start with some icebreakers, when you're brainstorming you have to get people out of their headspace of being in the box, because guess what, when we're at work sometimes we're so busy we just want to get things done, and we are in a box, but when you're brainstorming you have to get out of that box, icebreakers are a fantastic way of doing this, and do multiple ones, so that you can get people warmed up and ready to go, last but

not least before you start you need to time it, that is time each exercise that you're doing and really stick to this, again it's about quantity not quality, so I keep on saying to people, dump dump dump, don't worry about perfection, and when you do have the clock ticking, A, it keeps you on track, but it also forces people to dump, because they need to produce, on that note when we get to those exercises, those brainstorming exercises, they're gonna help you round-robin brainstorming this is

a great brainstorming technique to really kick off your session with because what you're gonna do is, you're gonna go around the room, and everybody is gonna build off of someone else's idea, and everyone's gonna have a turn, so there's a couple of things here that's really important, one you want to get everybody into the groove, you don't want anyone to be left out, and when you're very clear, you can start directing people and challenge them to think a little bit differently, I've done this t

wo ways, I've done it out loud where I said okay everybody here's brainstorming this, the first thing, the next person, next person, but I've also done it quiet where we had a piece of paper, because some people, depending on your group, may not like to speak up, they're just not comfortable yet, and so you can do it on paper and they can pass the paper to the next person, the key though, is once you've collected all that information, if people are speaking, you're gonna be collecting on a flipc

hart paper, and if it's quiet you're, gonna look at the paper, you're gonna review it, and talk about it as a group, every brainstorming activity you're always gonna look and talk about what it is that you created at the end of that particular exercise, the Charette method, you use this method when you have multiple topics to brainstorm, you need to ensure that everybody is included in that process, you have a very short period of time in order to do it, so how you do this method, is you have ea

sels around room, flipchart paper on an easel, and you have a topic on each one, so different topic, and you have, you break people up into teams so this is usually when you have larger teams, you break them out into teams, and you put them on a flip chart, and they're supposed to do brainstorming around that particular topic, the key here though, is you then, after a period of time, that you have delegated, let's say five minutes, you then have them move to the next easel with flip chart paper,

and their to build off of those ideas, so it's really important as a facilitator, you tell people to write clearly, and have detail, because that's gonna be important for those building off of other ideas, but this is a great way to get multiple brainstorming ideas out there, when you have multiple topics, with large groups, five why's, okay my personal favorite as an efficiency person, and with all the continuous improvement methodology I do I use this one all the time, it is an excellent tech

nique when you're trying to figure out route cost to an issue, so if you have an issue you know to brainstorm, it like why is this happening, you do the five why's, now what is the five why's, it's literally here's my problem, and you say well why is that happening, and you come up with a potential reason why, and then you ask the next why, why is that happening, so on and so forth, by the time you get to the fifth why, you're actually getting to the root cause of the problem, but I want you to

make sure that it's a controllable root cause, that you can put a solution in place to fix, now one of the quality checks we do is, once you've done your five whys and you feel that you've come to the conclusion that yes, that's a controllable root cause, you can then work backwards by saying, here's my root cause because this happened, therefore and you go back to the last why you talked about that, and this happens therefore, and you go back, and it should get you to the issues, so that's just

a QC Equality check that you can do, excellent technique I promise you if you have any issue ask the five whys, and sometimes we say duck, because people get pissed off with you, when you keep on asking them why, why, why, why, why but it works, I promise, figure storming, now this is fun, it's just fun, what you do is, you have your issue that you're trying to brainstorm, or your idea, whatever it may be, and you pick certain famous people, or characters, or a combination of both, so you may w

ant to have Trump, Oprah, the Pope, Superman, Batman, whatever it may be, and those are your headers, and then you divide people up into teams, and they go to that particular flip chart paper in an easel, and they brainstorm based on that famous person, or character, how they would probably answer the question, it's fun, and that's the whole point, again, brainstorming is about quantity, so don't worry about the quality, and what you get, because you can always revise it afterwards, but some rea

lly fun cool things happen, and why I really like this one is because it helps with creativity of letting go any preconceived notions that sometimes people have when they come into brainstorming sessions, brainstorm competition, now I totally believe in having fun competition that is light-hearted, I don't believe pitting people against each other, because I don't think you get a lot of good ideas that way, so when we talk about competition and you have a large group, it's supposed to be fun and

exciting to see what people come up with, and one way you do this, that I have done many times very successfully, is you divide your group into teams, put each team on an easel with flip chart paper, give them the idea and time it, okay people you have five minutes, ten minutes, to come up with as many as you can, the key here, because it's a competition, you need a prize for the winner ,and the winners are the ones that come up with the most ideas, because again, this is about quantity, not qu

ality, and interestingly enough, actually we're really good at dumping ideas for the first 10 to 15 even 20, after that it becomes difficult, so that the more they can do, the more ideas you're going to get to really build off of, to get your quality, idea now what I've done for prizes, and it's really gonna be up to you, your group, the people that you do, you can do, what I like to do is I'd like to give away a million dollars, and that is with the scratch ticket lottery ticket, which is alway

s a lot of fun, people laugh at that, but if people don't want to do that, you can give candy, you can find something that's really inexpensive, to really motivate people to say, here's the competition, get to it, now that you have some tried-and-true awesome group brainstorming techniques that you, as a facilitator, can use at your next brainstorming session, I promise you structure is key to be successful, I want you to go to the download below, and pull this free meeting rules list, I use thi

s all the time with all my clients, and every workshop that I do, because it just lets everybody know what the expectations are, and that is critical if you're gonna be successful, on that note I want to thank you for hanging out and seeing this video, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and share it with all the colleagues that you know, that all being said, do you have any additional group brainstorming techniques that you would like to share with me, I would love to hear fro

m you, until then, I should say until the next video see you later.