Boost Your Teams Ideation Process In Just Five Minutes
Creating many new ideas should never take hours to do
Let’s allow out imaginations take us to a conference room where things are getting done. Are you ready? Let’s go. With the timer set and sticky notes and pens in hand a team of seven gets set to go on a sprint of a fantastic brainstorming exercise called 10 for 10. As the time flies, pens also move with swiftness while they churn out one concept after another. Well, truthfully some don’t create as quickly as others because they’re trying to come up with the perfect idea but that’s okay because the facilitator is there to help keep them on track. The focus is not on the quality but on the quantity. The goal being to come up with as many ideas as possible in just 5 minutes.
At the sound of the timer going off some let out a sigh of relief but others are disappointed that it’s over as they’re thinking of even more ways to solve the problem. In the end, this mixed team of people from varying departments have about 80 ideas to help address the matter at hand. Yes 80 in just 5 minutes! What problem are they trying to tackle? An issue that relates to company wide dysfunction. You know the one.
Organizational dysfunction is commonplace
Instances of dysfunction within companies is unfortunately not a rare occurrence. Have you ever asked yourself why one department has up-to-date technology to do the job but another doesn’t? Or why do the various sites within the same country use completely different vendors causing it to lose money when there should be one account with one supplier for the entire company? Oh, and here’s another question, why does one site give out bonuses at a complete different time then another? Could this misalignment in fundamental areas be a result of dysfunctional meetings? I’ll let you answer that for yourself.
Perhaps no one came together to figure out what the best thing to do across the board would be. Let’s face it people are so busy with their different work responsibilities to even meet for too long and when they do it leads to less and less productivity. And that’s why quick, silent ideation sessions are key. They help groups to come up with potentially awesome ideas in just minutes as opposed to being the a result of several long drawn out meetings. It also takes the dread out of having to meet together.
What you need to duplicate a brief ideation session
Now that there are so many choices to pick from what’s the next step you may wonder. Well, keep a look out for the answer in another article but in the meantime if you were to try implementation of this quick concept creation exercise here’s what you would need:
A topic or problem to solve
One block of sticky notes per person
One black marker/pen per person
Ten circular dots
A timer visible to all set to 5 minutes
A blank wall, whiteboard or magnetic paper
Holding quick, easy impactful brainstorming sessions is just as easy as that. Check out my next article to see what comes next in getting a decision made with no time wasted.