Brainstorming

The new WSC committee had their first management meeting a month or so ago and have a fundraising brainstorming session scheduled for this weekend, followed by a general committee meeting the next Saturday. The fundraising sub-committee have had their thinking caps on and will head up to the meeting room at West Winds on Saturday to throw their ideas around and hopefully come up with some sound proposals to put before the rest of the committee.

I decided to look into what's involved in conducting a brainstorming session. The rules seem to be quite simple. At the start of the session, the issue being addressed should be defined as a simple problem, in our case it will probably be something along the lines of “How can we raise money?” Once the “problem” has been defined, a time limit should be set on the actual brainstorming process, 20 -30 minutes is suggested by Jeffrey Baumgartner in his article titled: The Step by Step Guide to Brainstorming

During this time participants should call out ideas, which are faithfully recorded on a whiteboard, a big sheet of paper or some-such – and idea-wise anything goes! The aim is to stimulate creativity, so no idea should be rejected at this stage, in fact the more 'out there' ideas can often act as a catalyst leading towards previously un-thought of and creative solutions.

Once the time limit has passed the group should agree on the top five ideas and create a series of criteria (around five) by which to judge them, for example: the idea should be financially viable, the idea should be legal and so on and so forth. Each idea is then assessed against these criteria and the idea that best addresses these is adopted as the solution.

Sounds like fun!