Effective Brainstorming

Developed by Alexandros Bellos

Abstract

Brainstorming is a data gathering and creative thinking process widely used in project management, where groups of people, or teams, get together in order to generate ideas and possible solutions about a specific common problem or area of interest. It was not communicated as a formal creative process until Alex Osborn detailed the practice in the book Your creative power in 1948. Currently, as a research-based divergent thinking tool, recommended also in the PMBOK® Guide, brainstorming is considered as one of the dominant idea-generation techniques.

In almost every project, creative thinking on a daily basis is a vital element for the project success. Therefore, in order to achieve that and reach their team's common goals, project managers often organize brainstorming sessions and have the role of facilitator.

Typically, a brainstorming session is structured in a way that participants share different perspectives, experiences, lessons learned about the problem and their ideas are recorded for later analysis. All the participants need to have a clear understanding of the problem and its context and acknowledge the defined and necessary steps of the process. Moreover, it is imperative that everyone is equal and shares different perspectives.

Group dynamics can be proven crucial for the effectiveness of a brainstorming session. When individuals generate ideas alone, no one disagrees or judges the quality of an idea or its owner. On the contrary, during a brainstorming session, participants are actively engaged in discussion, increasing the amount of generated ideas and possible solutions. Ergo, the key to brainstorming is creating an environment that encourages a spectrum of ideation.

In the following article, the origin of brainstorming from the Osborn's method and the term of creative thinking will be analyzed, followed by the key aspects and their constraints, for a successful and effective brainstorming session that project managers need to take into consideration. Finally, various types of brainstorming techniques will be presented, and the importance of the facilitator as a key-role will be explained.

Origin of Brainstorming

Creativity and Creative Thinking

Creativity is a very important skill for everyone, especially for engineers, when coming up with ideas or solutions for different problems and issues is needed, not only in extraordinary situations but also in daily life. It is considered as a soft skill and can thus be further developed and improved. Creative thinking is the art of breaking with patterns, habits and certainties and the art whereby something new is formed, which is somehow valuable. It mainly depends of 3 factors: mindset, techniques used and environment (including other people around). Some of the key factors of creative thinking are:

• • Postponement of judgement, accept all ideas
  • Openness in your team, privacy to the outside
  • Extra focus on naive ideas
  • Think associative & piggyback on ideas of others
  • Perceive what is said and what is happening
  • Let your imagination flow
  • Strive to be different
  • Many ideas mean many opportunities