Brainstorming Guidelines

• Have someone record all ideas.

• Keep your mind open to ALL ideas, both your own and others. Let the ideas flow freely.

• Do not belittle ANY ideas. As soon as one person expresses doubts (or even worse) about another team member's idea, it will inhibit others from speaking out. Also, extreme ideas may trigger a more realistic idea that wouldn't have thought of otherwise.

• Only once your team has exhausted ALL ideas, crazy and otherwise, should you stop generating and recording and start evaluating what ideas are real possibilities and what ones should be discarded.

• As you pare down your ideas, consider how an extreme idea might be interpreted in another way that might be useful.

• Eventually, you want to end up with a manageable number of alternative solutions, something like 3 to 5 of them. It might be the case that you can mix and match parts of ideas into new alternatives.

• Throughout the whole process, make sure that EVERYONE is encouraged to participate and that everyone's input is treated with respect. Remember that everyone has something to contribute. Some of the best ideas may come from people who are Introverts(I) rather than Extraverts(E) (see Personality Index). They may be slower to express their ideas because they tend to develop the ideas more fully internally before expressing them. Also, everyone has different experiences to bring to a problem.

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  Jane Fritz, jane@unb.ca

  Last modified September 2006