Brainstorming – a method we’ve come to hate

Wednesday, 9am. You are coming to work and checking your inbox. You’ve got an email from your boss: ’We have a brainstorming session on Friday. I want all of you to come up with 5 brand new ideas.’

You start thinking:’Dear Lord, it’s good he hasn’t asked from me to come up with 10 new original ways to use a paperclip.. Or to draw 10 houses, each different than the other, on a single A4 paper.’

Does this ring a bell?

All the information that we receive from the outside world through our senses are filtered and we create our own experience based on that. We create our point of view.

Brainstorming method,
as the key method for generating ideas and innovation,
has become despised by growing number of people.

Various people have got sick of this method for various reasons, and the explanation I usually hear is people claiming for themselves that they’re not creative.

But where do creativity and ideas really come from?

Communication model of NLP could possibly offer us an answer to this question.

All the information that we receive from the outside world through our senses are filtered and we create our own experience based on that.We create our point of view.

Twisting is one of the unconscious filters that is processing the information in a way that they start fitting in what we expect or what we believe in. That is also any kind of adding a particular meaning to a description based on senses. Whenever we say to someone that he or she has a nice T-shirt, or that it’s of utmost importance for someone to graduate, of that a certain cloud resembles a bunny – those are all examples of twisting. This exact filter is in charge for all the creative processes. This filter enables us to change or perception and experience, to dream and fantasize.

Leading expert in the field of creativity,Ken Robinson, says that creativity is applied imagination“.

Exercise: In what way can we fantasize in our work?

One of the exercises that has proven, at least in my experience, to be very successful for generating new ideas or encouraging creative thinking, provides us with a chance to use the twisting filter in the best way possible. All you need is a paper, a pen and a task that you want to create new solutions for.

The first step is to list all the obvious things and write them down.

For example, let’s say that you want to innovate the process of serving food in a restaurant – In the first step you would write down the following: ’Guests are coming through the door, sitting at the table, ordering food from a waiter, a chef prepares the food in the kitchen, guests are eating from a plate…

The second step for you is to write all the things that you have previously written, but in the opposite way.

Using our previous example with a restaurant, it would look like this: ’Restaurant is coming towards the guests, guests are standing, waiter is serving food that guests are preparing for eating, they eat it from a pot…

Maybe your funny idea may lead to the real question or the idea of some other member of the team, so that you could together offer a brand new solution to your client.

This simple exercise can really boost creativity.Do not be afraid of anything that may cross your mind. Between the rest, the basic rule of brainstorming is that the ideas can’t be judged. All that mess is precisely contributing to creative thinking.

Maybe your funny idea may lead to the real question or the idea of some other member of the team, so that you could together offer a brand new solution to your client.

In the end, all the fun is exactly in this process.

Nikola Rajić
Dipl.Ing. of Organizational Sciences
Trainer and facilitator

The first step is to list all the obvious things and write them down.

The second step for you is to write all the things that you have previously written, but in the opposite way.

Maybe your funny idea may lead to the real question or the idea of some other member of the team, so that you could together offer a brand new solution to your client.

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