Abstract: If you work in an office, your boss has probably forced you into a brainstorming session or two (or 12). Invented in the 1940s by an advertising executive, the purpose was to solicit a large number of ideas in a short period of time. By putting a collective of creative people in the same room, better concepts should come. Sounds very agile.
However, science has shown several times that brainstorming is a terrible technique. It’s cumbersome due to all of the interdependent activities happening at once. When spending time generating ideas as a group, you often spend more time thinking of others ideas than your own.
Fortunately, a relatively unknown technique is starting to gain popularity called brainwriting. Simply put, brainwriting involves a group generating ideas alone and passing them around the group in short bursts. It's a combination of group and individual interactions. Incorporating it into your team events can produce more diverse ideas and provide a friendlier environment for collaboration. In this session, I will review my experience with them in the past year and leave the audience with some tools to bring brainwriting back to their offices.
Lessons Learned from Your Experience: - Chief amongst this study were the following keys to my experience with this technique:
- - The fallacy of brainstorming: appealing to the head and the heart of the matter.
- - Why the right environment matters for generating ideas.
- - What exactly makes an idea diverse?
- - A comparison of individual idea generation vs. group idea generation.
- - A walkthrough of I used brainwriting in some of my team events.
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