Tool and Techniques - Brainstorming
Uploaded by xbirdiex on Jan 08, 2007
Creativity and innovation are the lifeblood of an organization. New ideas can lead to programs that are superior to those that are already going on or planned in the organization. By using brainstorming, a powerful decision making tool, it can effectively generating radical ideas, and help people break out their thinking patterns into new ways of looking at things.
The purpose of a brainstorming session is to work as a group to define a problem, and find, through a team member’s intervention, the best group decision for a plan of action to solve it. (Bartle, 2003, p1) We need to understand that we are aiming the success for the team, not for an individual. While utilizing this approach to decision making it is helpful to create some ground rules in order to maximize efficiency. Some ground rules that we can use as following:
· Criticism of ideas isn't allowed.
· All ideas, no matter how wild, are encouraged.
· The more ideas, the better.
· Every participant should try to build on or combine the ideas of others. (Bradbury, 2004, p1)
Brainstorming involves quickly recording a broad list of ideas, which can then be expanded and evaluated. During a brainstorming session, ideas should be generated as quickly as possible in order to develop the most creative and varied list of alternatives. Participants in the brainstorming process should come from as wide a range of disciplines as possible. This brings a broad range of experience to the session and helps to make it more creative.
There are several different brainstorming processes, such as round robin, nominal technique, and Post-It Note brainstorming (DeJanasz, Dowd, and Schneider, 2001, p398). I am working in AR department in a large employment service Company. My manager often use round robin brainstorming process to collect team members’ ideas during meetings. In the last meeting, the topic we discussed was how to save time and space for the back-up copies. Since we are required to keep at lease two copies for every transaction, plus our company is expanding, it became harder and harder to keep up with the filing, storing and research with our current system. After the topic was announced, we think about the question for a few moments, and then one by one, we give some ideas or suggestions. Ideas such as, request additional storage room, buy a scanner, hire some people, and upload files into Internet, etc. After all the ideas have been...