Brain Storming Technique

Abstract

-History:

Brainstorming as an idea for the first time emerged back in 1942. The term was introduced by Alex Faickney Osborn, founder and advertising executive of the US advertising agency BBDO. In fact, brainstorming was introduced as a creative technique inspired by the working atmosphere in BBDO. Namely, during his time in the company, Osborn’s observations of the everyday work in the office took him closer to developing this creative technique. He found out that during the company’s meetings and discussions, all employees were not proposing creative ideas, methods or solutions, which resulted in poor meetings’ closings.

Business meetings are supposed to be an opportunity to set goals and objectives, present and define problems, propose and discuss ideas, and in the end, work toward realizing them. Osborn was aware that the conventional business meetings he and his colleagues held didn’t include an exchange of fruitful ideas and were usually suppressing people’s spontaneity and the ability of free-thinking. This inspired him to establish new basic principles of conducting effective meetings that will be based on freedom of mind and creative thinking.

Purpose

The purpose of brainstorming is to generate ideas and share knowledge to solve a particular commercial or technical problem. The participants are encouraged to think freely without interruption.

Having a clear idea of the topic to be addressed is critical to creating a successful brainstorming session. A topic that is too specific can restrict thinking, while an ill-defined topic will not produce enough directly applicable ideas.

Big Idea

This approach to problem-solving is part of Design Thinking. You use it in the ideation phase. It is extremely popular with design teams because they are able to think outside the box. Teams are guided by rules but are free to use lateral thinking and new ideas to solve problems.

-MERITS:

There are many benefits to brainstorming as it is one of the most useful tools for problem-solving process and helping in achieving better communication in the meanwhile, one of the major benefits:

*Encourages Creativity: Brainstorming creates a lot of ideas and promotes organizational innovation. It broadens members' thinking so that they can come up with the most creative solutions to the problem.

It can provide a variety of options since Ideas are formed in groups rather than individually.

*Generates bigger quantity of ideas: Since the process is made by a group, and if the moderator motivates the members to produce the most amount of ideas in the shortest timeframe, This creates the maximum amount of ideas possible and guarantees a good quantity.

*Participation builds Responsibility: Since the process is a collaborative experience, all members of the meeting will participate in the idea generation. This creates a sense of ownership and responsibility towards the issue or project. Which will then increase the passion and motivation to reach even a higher point of creativity and production.

*Easy to setup: The brainstorming techniques which will be mentioned below, are once acquired easy to set up, understand and use. which reduces the sense of confusion and time-wasting.

*Saves Resources: Since most of the brainstorming techniques are digital or basic office material, in addition to not requiring much time and resources to set up. it guarantees saving time and money other than other consulting options.

-In order to make sure that these Benefits are established and acquired several steps or rules has to be done.

These rules and Suggestions are carried out or set by the organiser which can be the team leader, supervisor or even a Manager, they are made to make sure to get the most out of the brainstorming session.

An example of some of the rules:

1-set a deadline: Setting a deadline helps improve the speed of the idea generation process

2-Define the main problem/goal: Start the process with a clear definition of the needed goal to achieve or problem to solve, in order to focus the ideas on the desired outcome.

3-Deny or block any Idea criticism: By working with the principle that there are no bad ideas, the members involved would not feel shy or preserve some of the ideas, which might define the needed solution. in addition to removing chances of conflicts or bad feelings in working the enviroment.

4-Quanitity over quality: Keep motivating even the simplest ideas in order to produce the biggest number of possible solutions which will be later on filtered in the process.

5-use variety of tools: By using the big variety of tools in hand and digitally the members can achieve better and more organised solutions, this also helps to structure the thought process and solution filtering in the next steps such tools are: SWOT which will be discussed in the Applications part.

Application

Examples of Brainstorming uses:

1- Problem Solving

2- Marketing advertisements

3- Project Management

4- Process Management

5- Management Planning

6- any other obstacle-solution scenario in real life.