In a brainstorm everybody is invited to submit their input – and all input is shared to allow maximum inspiration from others.
This has proven extremely effective. By providing all participants with a personal terminal, just two minutes of brainstorm can create a really good overview of the thoughts and ideas that drive a large group.
Sometimes it is more useful to allow a little more time for the exercise and to have the group agree on just one or two important inputs.
This process of dialogue qualifies the input – and the discussion in itself can turn out to be a very important part of the learning process.
During the process the facilitator may pick a few representative inputs and use them to stimulate a discussion.
Alternatively, all input could be shared in a word cloud, which counts the meaningful words and presents them in order of appearances.
Sometimes we even pick out six to eight representative statements from a brainstorm and ask the participants to rank them in order of importance using drag & drop.
This is a quick way of turning qualitative input into quantitative data – based directly on the input generated in the room.
An advanced variant is clustered brainstorms.
This is used when it seems more meaningful to have the participants analyze a subject related to, for example, their country or their business unit than to share a general brainstorm.
The magic part is that clustered brainstorms allow you to complete a clustered group session in just five minutes – without wasting time on sending people back and forth – and without needing loads of extra group rooms.
Each participant can share input from their position even in a mixed group – and thereby share ideas with their own cluster to be used later in the program or after the conference.
While thinking about your own input, you can get inspired by the entries of other participants. |
When the brainstorm is open, you type in your input and share it with everybody else (newest entries appear at the top of the list). |
Specific entries can be picked out and made the subject of a vote – in this case via a ranking of 0 to 9 points. |
All rankings are combined into a list – with the highest rankings on top. |