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Brain Bash—When You Don't Have Time to Brainstorm

By Peter Lloyd

Wouldn’t it be nice if every time you ran a brainstorming session, you also were able to prepare properly and ensure optimum results? Well, you can’t. Sometimes you need to get your team together for an impromptu idea session without doing everything that would make it as productive as possible. That’s when it’s time to Brain Bash.

What It Is
Brain Bashing is to brainstorming as dynamite is to a nuclear bomb. That’s not to say it has to be a waste of time. TNT can make a lot of earth move. And when you do it right, Brain Bashing beats the heck out of merely putting your heads together.

When to Brain Bash
The better you prepare a brainstorming session with necessary information and stimulation, the greater number and more creative ideas you will generate. But sometimes you just don’t have time to prepare. Stage a Brain Bash when you want to explore the creative possibilities of just about any opportunity at a moment’s notice. Just don’t get in the habit of Brain Bashing instead of scheduling brainstorming sessions with adequate preparation.

How to Brain Bash
Lasso the folks you need and pull them into a room with whiteboards or a couple of easels. A Brain Bash demands zero tolerance for hand holding. No time to train or explain. So invite only your best brainstormers—idea spewers, team players, the folks who know how to leave their egos at the door.

Keep your team down to no more than seven players. Less is more. And don’t limit yourself to people who are currently working on the problem, the account, or the product. In a pinch, you need to reach for outside ideas from outsiders. Ideally, include someone else in the who group knows enough about the challenge to answer questions without wandering off into the wasteland of useless information.

Prepare Now
Even though you cannot prepare adequately for a brainstorming session an hour from now, you can prepare now for the inevitable short-notice session you’re bound to run next week.

1. Save all the ideas from all your sessions. Even better, database them and categorize them by type. For example, how many times have you had to generate ideas for time-saving processes? Product promotions? Engineering shortcuts? Birthday party themes? If you save and sort the ideas from all these sessions today, you can use them to stimulate brainstormers tomorrow.

If you’re lucky, someone who remembers an idea from a past session will bring it up in your next such session. But if you save and sort, you can start all your sessions with a pile of ideas from similar sessions. You’ll save time and hit the ground running by building on and altering similar ideas.

2. Have brainstorming tools readily available, so your can grab them and get going on short notice. Books and websites on creativity and brainstorming are full of simple and effective brainstorming exercises. Build a cabinet of exercises that anyone can use. Train a number of people how to use your exercises. Customize them to suit your purposes, but adapt them from the basic, tried-and-true techniques such as Brainwriting, SCAMPER, Analogies.

Note: The links above give you detailed instructions for each exercise. Don’t expect to use them at the drop of a hat. Study and adapt them ahead of time.

3. Train everyone, if possible, but at least as many people as possible, how to facilitate an idea-generation session. Start with the basic rules and adapt them to your situation. Encourage your facilitators to work with each other to upgrade your tools and procedures on an ongoing basis.

Everybody Wins
We've all suffered through so-called brainstorming sessions that start off like a death march and end up in the swamp of political turf wars. If you get a hearty core of folks facile in the art of Brain Bashing and pleased with the results, you'll find them on your side when you start enforcing the rules in bigger brainstorming sessions.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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