Effective Brainstorming

1. 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. [1][2]

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.

References

[1] Osborn, A.F. (1963) Applied imagination: Principles and procedures of creative problem solving (Third Revised Edition). New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons.