FROM DILIP MUKERJEA'S ITINERANT TOOLBOX: BRAINSTORMING

PURPOSE:

To unleash a stream of ideas within minutes, through individual or group synergy.

Brainstorming is often a group problem-solving process. The term was coined by Alex Osborn, one of the legendary pioneers in the field of creativity.

Osborn was an advertising executive in the 1930s, with a modest goal: bring business meetings to life!

He was frustrated by the inefficiency of the meetings; they seemed to produce poor decisions, and were frequently a waste of time.

In his best-selling book, 'Applied Imagination', Osborn described how the name ‘brainstorming’ was born:

It was in 1938 when I first employed organised ideation in the company I then headed (an advertising agency). The early participants dubbed our efforts ‘Brainstorming Sessions’; quite aptly so because, in this case, ‘brainstorm’ means using the brain to storm a problem.

Apparently, Osborn linked 'brainstorming' to creativity only as an afterthought. Perhaps even he did not see this connection in the beginning.

In his magnum opus, 'Applied Imagination', he reveals that the concept and practice of brainstorming was common in India for more than 400 years as a strategy used by Hindu teachers when working with religious groups.

The Indian term for this methodology is Prai-Barshana; Prai means ‘outside yourself’ and Barshana means ‘question’. Thus, in these sessions, prejudgement, analytical discussion, or
criticism, was not permitted. The group would evaluate ideas only at a later stage, most likely after a suitable incubation period.

Rules of Brainstorming:

■ Suspend judgement;

■ Allow all suggestions, even absurd and impractical ones;

■ Consider every idea and person as valuable;

■ Free-wheel; be outrageous;

■ Aim for quantity of ideas; this will lead to quality;

■ Write down every idea;

■ Combine, piggy-back, refine the ideas;

Some rules, created principally by Osborn, have been established over time. They eliminate ego dominance, suspend judgement, and involve all participants in a democratic process.

The standard group size varies from five to ten people. However, in the ‘brainwriting’ method described on the following page, the process has been used successfully on groups of 50 to 70 people.

Theoretically, the numbers could go higher. In the methods described on the following pages, the author has repeatedly witnessed wonderfully successful outcomes with the following attributes:

Time limit for a group of 30 participants: 5 minutes

Total number of ideas generated: from 350 to 380

% duplication of ideas: from 20% to 50%

% of similar ideas after eliminating duplicates: from 10% to 30%

Number of top quality ideas after distilling the balance: from 1 to 20.

Now, even if there were one brilliant idea out of this exercise, it was a result of top class group synergy, and obtained in only 300 seconds!

If in the end, there is a shortlist of several options, they could be mind mapped by teams of, say, five people.

If the total group size is 30 people, this makes six teams. Ten minutes later, they come together with their respective Mind Maps, and distill their collective outpourings.

The group then spends another ten minutes, making a Master Mind Map. This serves as the reference chart from which decisions can be made.

Total processing time from Brainstorming to Mind Mapping to arriving at a final decision: 30 minutes, maximum!

[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from 'Surfing the Intellect: Building Intellectual Capital for a Knowledge Economy', by Dilip Mukerjea. All the images in this post are the intellectual property of Dilip Mukerjea.]