Many Minds (and a Whiteboard) Make Right Work

Eddy captures the inspiration Friday shared with us at our last workshop.

On Wednesday 30th of June, Media Design School overflowed with creative energy as Friday O’Flaherty, Creative Strategist at Running with Scissors, and one of this year’s yMedia Challenge judges, proved that many minds make right work through his workshop about how to brainstorm.

Friday started by pointing out that he doesn’t have all the answers. He then shared with us some of the brainstorming tools that he uses to find the best answers.

He asked (somewhat rhetorically) ‘why storm?’ And funnily enough his response went back to acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers. As an individual, you might have a couple of ideas, but if you extend your thinking to a wider group and involve more people – logic tells us that you’re likely to come up with a lot more solutions to the problem. Each person involved in a brainstorm stimulates the memory and imagination of the others in the group, and you end up with more creative solutions than what you may have come up with alone.

Now that we knew why we should brainstorm, we were taken on a journey of ‘how to brainstorm’. Friday outlined that you first need to turn your problem into points of focus. To do this you need to simplify your problem into smaller pieces, rather than trying to solve it all in one go.

Then came the rules of a brainstorm.

• Everyone’s ideas are welcome
• All ideas are good ideas
• Don’t judge, don’t criticise
• Every idea must go on the board
• We only need the idea, not an explanation or any supporting documentation
• There is only one person in charge – that person is the facilitator of the brainstorm

Then it was time for us to give it a go. The room split into three groups, one for each of the community groups present – Watersafe, Urban Pantry and NZ Charter of Health Practitioners. Each group set a point of focus, and we came up with weird and wonderful suggestions.

But what do we do with all of these ideas?

Friday outlined that through idea generation or brainstorming sessions, you come up with both ideas and directions. Ideas are the things that work as they are, and can be developed and implemented, but directions shouldn’t be discounted. Sometimes your first idea generation session doesn’t provide the end solution, but it does provide some interesting directions for further exploration.

Friday used an example from Urban Pantry’s idea generation. One idea they’d come up with was to use moss graffiti - this was a great idea that with development and planning about placement, messaging etc could work as it was. They also came up with ‘deterring Boy Racers’ – which isn’t an idea, but it is a direction worth exploring, which could lead to richer ideas.

To help assess the ideas, Friday also introduced us to two of Edward De Bono’s hats – Black, for negative and Yellow, for positive. We each picked our favourite idea from the board, and as a group we first looked at it with the Black Hat and say everything that wasn’t good about the idea and reasons that it may not work. We then had to change our attitude and look at the same idea with a Yellow Hat, and say all the great things about the idea and the reasons that we liked it.

This method meant that the whole group was assessing the idea in the same way, at the same time, rather than the group arguing their points about it – which Friday pointed out, can actually be counter-productive.

Friday also said that once you look at the positives and negatives you can then assess the idea properly, and look at the areas that need development to negate some of the problems that may have come up in the negatives.

He summed up his inspiring session by saying:

• The brainstorm is a powerful tool
• Turn the problem into Points of Focus - keep it simple
• Follow the simple rules when you storm
• Then look for ideas and directions
• Black and yellow hats can help you assess your ideas

Everyone left feeling well armed with the tools to find the right ideas – and we’re putting Friday’s advice about brainstorming into practice already!