Regardless of your age, income, marital status, or social level, you are having or will have a problem that needs to be solved as soon as possible.
Brainstorming is effective in capturing ideas that help to solve any kind of problems. There are 6 ways to do effective brainstorming which includes asking right questions, going for quantity over quality, no judgements, randomness, teaming up with others and combining ideas together.
In this article I’ll show you how to brainstorm ideas effectively with 6 different tools to generate lots of ideas that you can choose from to solve any problem you have. First, let me explain types of problems you might have before diving into finding the solution.
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Types of Problems
There are 2 types of problems I coach my clients:
- The Direct/Negative problems
- The Indirect/Positive.
The Direct or Negative Problems
These are the problems that directly and clearly impact you in a negative way. Examples include problems like; a house mortgage you have to pay off, a student loan you have to settle, or a broken car you have to fix, or a disease you have to fight, or a relationship you need to work on, etc.
These are the kind of problems that you must deal with as soon as possible. Delaying them will only worsen the situation.
The Indirect or Positive Problems
These are also known as “Areas to Improve”. There is nothing wrong with them that needs immediate actions, but they are areas you identify that could be improved if you worked on them.
For example, the car you want to upgrade to. There’s nothing wrong with your current car, but you think you want to have the bigger or the faster one. It could be the dream house you want to buy, or the second stream of income you want to have with your primary job to be more secure financially, or maybe it’s the habit you want to build to take your relationship to the next level.
All of the above take a portion of your thinking on how to deal with them and that’s why both are problems need to be solved to free up that space in your brain.
What is brainstorming?
Warning!! My definition may come across strong, but it’s the perfect definition that works when I use it in my coaching sessions.
Brainstorming is:
A projectile vomiting of ideas
……………………..
(Told you it’s going to be strong) Plus, I’m a physician so environment plays a role here I guess 😊
So, why brainstorming is a projectile vomiting of ideas,
Well, it’s projectile, so it’s fast, powerful and active. And in brainstorming you need to come up with ideas fast and actively engage with it.
It’s vomiting, so it’s uncontrollable and unstructured, meaning just like in vomiting where you can’t filter what’s coming out or organize it, in brainstorming you shouldn’t filter ideas coming out of you, nor structure them in any kind of format.
(I hope you’re still here 😀 )
What is NOT brainstorming?
Now that you know that brainstorming is about generating ideas fast, actively, and without filtering them. This means that brainstorming is not: Mind Mapping nor Project Planning.
Brainstorming is often used to mean mind mapping or project planning which is not entirely right because of two reasons:
- Brainstorming, as we discussed, is about free flow of ideas without filtering or organizing in a structured format. On the other hand, mind mapping and project planning are about organizing ideas as per sequence or priority, in an organized structured and connected format.
- Brainstorming is about generating ideas so it’s a subset of the project planning and mind mapping. It’s just one phase of the whole process that can get repeated multiple times but we only end up with one project plan or one mind map.
This is important to know because summarizing the entire project planning into just brainstorming can and lead to premature ending to the whole planning. Many teams think they finished project planning because they brainstormed ideas for the product forgetting that there are other important pieces in the project planning like purpose, outcome and next actions.
To have a better picture about the relation between brainstorming and project planning, check the “How to increase your PRODUCTIVITY: 5 Lessons from Getting Things Done Book (GTD) by David Allen” video. You can go directly to the project planning timestamp and check where brainstorming fits in that process. (put link)
Same with Mind mapping, brainstorming is one step in creating a mind map. First you brainstorm story ideas, or writing ideas, or video ideas for your channel. So far this is just random ideas on a piece of paper, and this is called brainstorming. (figure 1)
The next step is to organize those ideas by relation or sequence and that picture you have is called mind map. (figure 2). You can check this mind mapping tutorial for more information on mind mapping benefits and its components.
Uses of brainstorming
Brainstorming is generating ideas to solve both types of problems we talked about in the introduction, and that’s why it has unlimited uses in your life. Any problem is really a project you need to plan and work on.
You can brainstorm ideas for how to fix your car or how to fix your marriage or how to get the project back under budget, etc. (Direct/negative problems)
You can brainstorm ideas for starting a business, for writing a story or a script or a blog, or a book, or a movie or a song, how to upgrade your life, how to be better in public speaking, how to be healthier, etc. (Indirect/positive problems= areas of improvement)
Simply put, brainstorming works with ANYthing you want. Just do it…
How to brainstorm effectively?
Brainstorming is easy, it’s all about generating ideas and there are 6 rules to follow to get the most benefits of brainstorming.
1- Using Right Questions
First rule is to have the right question. It’s all about knowing exactly what you want to brainstorm about. If your brainstorming meetings are not moving as well as you expected, then this may be the reason. You may have the best minds in the team with the most advanced tools, but without asking the right question, you’re wasting everyone’s time, energy and money.
The keyword here is Right, if you have low product sales because it’s not user friendly, then instead of using the question “how to increase the product sales?” you should use the right question which is “how to make the next product more user friendly?” which will increase the sales as a result.
Same problem, different questions, different mindsets, different focus, and definitely, different ideas and solutions. Once this problem is solved you can move on to the next problem which could be improving sales.
It works on a personal level as well. If the marriage problem is the aggressive attitude, then it’s best to brainstorm ideas on how to reduce the aggressiveness rather than brainstorming ideas to improve the relationship overall. Zoom in on the exact problem then move on to the other problems afterwards.
2- Quantity
Brainstorming is about quantity not quality. The quality part is for the next phases when you review generated ideas, filter them, group them in different themes and choose what to work on. But at the brainstorming stage, it’s just about coming up with as many ideas as you can. It’s Projectile, remember.
3- No Judgements.
Brainstorming is about having all the ideas possible, small or big, smart or stupid, real or fiction, serious or fun, cheap or expensive. It’s vomiting remember. Since you can’t control what comes out of your stomach during vomiting, in brainstorming you shouldn’t control what comes out of your brain either.
This is where most brainstorming sessions get stuck, trying to come up with THE BRILLIANT idea first while the logic says that it’s easier to find the brilliant idea when you have a bunch of ideas to look into.
To stir the pie in my brainstorming sessions, alone or with others, I often start with few silly, on top of my mind ideas, even if they’re not relevant at all. The goal here is to warm up my brain and to put other members at ease to express any ideas they have as they will be much better than what I shared publicly.
4- Free Flow.
Brainstorming is about having ideas in a free or random format, so you put one in the right, another on the left, another on the top, etc. not necessarily intentionally, what I mean is you don’t need to think about where to put the next idea. Just write it in the free space you have.
This is a big difference between brainstorming that doesn’t have any connection between ideas yet and mind mapping which is all about a map of connected and structured keywords.
If you’re brainstorming on paper then just write any where that’s still empty. Later on you can reorganize that into a mind map. If you’re brainstorming digitally using tools like Mural, MindManager or any other mind mapping software you can use any free part you want in the screen or it can horizontally if you’re using the “tab” key to automatically create another empty sticky note or bubble which is the faster approach I use.
5- More Brains Are Better Than One.
More brains mean more ideas and more diversity and that’s why having more people to brainstorm your idea is more preferred than doing it alone.
This still works if you’re doing the brainstorming alone for personal projects for example and you can do it in two ways:
- To brainstorm in more than one occasion or even day. Yes, you’re still the same person, but different days, may have different thinking, different perspective, different or fresh ideas. Just sleep on it for few days.
- To ask close friends or family members to brainstorm with you after briefing them on your project and what you’re trying to accomplish.
6- Combine Ideas.
In brainstorming, one of the ways to come up with ideas is to combine existing ones. That’s why in brainstorming 1+1=3. Cause you can take two different ideas and build a third one out of them.
How to keep brainstorming if you feel stuck
Sometimes you’ll feel that your brain became dry of any ideas to come up with or even add to the existing ones if you need more. This is normal and luckily we can trick our brain to overcome this. here are couple of ways you can do to boost your brainstorming:
1- You can change position.
If you’re sitting, then stand or walk. If you’re walking, then sit down, and so on. Changing position changes blood circulation all over the body including the brain which can result in more oxygenation (food) to the brain.
2- You can do light physical exercise
You can try walking, jogging or brisk walking or take the stairs up and down. Just like the 1st idea, this can increase food to your brain and increase likelihood of coming up with ideas.
3- You can take breaks.
If you’re brainstorming for a while (30 minutes or more) you can consider taking a short break to play music or a game, eat or drink, and then get back to your brainstorming session. You can also take longer breaks if needed where you call it a day and get back to it in another day. In other words, sleep on it.
4- Go Silly
Sometimes, it works for me to shift to silly or crazy or funny ideas. There are 2 reasons for that:
1- Laughter energizes the brain and boosts its functions.
2- Even though they are silly or crazy ideas, they are still ideas, that may give rise to other, more or less, good ideas.
What you don’t want now, you may need later.
Best Brainstorming Tools
It’s time for me to share best tools you can use for effective brainstorming for ideas to solve problems. There are couple of tools you can explore and choose from as suits you:
1- Pen and Paper
By far, the most tool I recommend using for any brainstorming is to simple go hands on and use pen and paper. It’s the most efficient and cost effective tool to use. Nothing will be as fast as writing your ideas as they pop up in your brain without having any technological barrier like lost connection or speed keyboard typing or difficult digital tool interface.
2- Mural
This is one of the digital tools that I used personally and it’s quite impressive actually. It’s an online white space that teams can use to collaborate and get things done. For any project I handled, I created a specific mural (page) for brainstorming needed. It had this speed feature that allows for capturing ideas fast. All I had to do is hit “tab” after writing the idea and it automatically creates another empty sticky notes to write on, then “tab” and so on.
3- MindManager and Imindmap
Those are mind mapping tools used online or as a desktop program and they have a space for brainstorming like Mural. The MindManager has the same feature of capturing ideas fast using the “tab” key and I don’t recall Imindmap having the same feature.
I use MindManager mostly to create mind maps for my projects and that’s why when it comes to brainstorming anything in that project, I use it instead of the pen and paper since I’m already there, it’s fast because I improved my speed typing on keyboard and I use the desktop program so it’s not dependent on internet connection.
4- Microsoft Whiteboard
It’s one of Microsoft’s applications and used as an online whiteboard to collaborate with others you invite to it. Also it has a sticky notes feature that you can use in brainstorming
All the digital tools mentioned above (2-4) have the same challenge of dependence on internet connection, expensive cost to some or having a barrier to capture ideas as fast as possible.
With pen and paper on the other hand, they are cheap, affordable, available anywhere and capture your ideas as fast as you think of them allowing you to stay in the brainstorming flow.
Conclusion
Brainstorming is key when it comes to generating ideas to solve any problem and to do it effectively you need to follow the 6 rules of brainstorming which are: using the right question, going for quantity, preventing judgements, free flow, involving more brains, and Combining ideas. You can use any tool you prefer, and I recommend using the pen and paper as it’s easier and suitable for all kinds of brainstorming needed.