Brainstorming 101

Brainstorming: (option 1)

This is best to do at the first meeting and periodically throughout the year. During a brain storming session all ideas are welcome (but are not to be debated). Bring some food and drinks and possibly break up into small groups.

• Have a topic to discussion in mind: What do you want to talk about? Remember, lead with direction!

• Choose your audience: Are the people who are present really the right audience? Make sure to invite people to the brainstorming session who have relevance or a common interest in what is being discussed. If you talking about the best way to improve the energy consumption of your school and the audience is there to talk about how to determine the best NBA team, well, you get the idea. However, if you are brainstorming about enhancing energy consumption and the audience is the cafeteria staff, this may be good. How can your school cook and serve food efficiently while cutting down on waste. Maybe one of the solutions is to go from self-serve to full service food lines, this way people don't take more than they need.

• Have a time limit: It is important to know how long you are going to be in the room brainstorming. We suggest no more than 25 or so minutes. This is meant to be quick and painless. The purpose is to get ideas on paper and have fun in the process.
  

• Write the ideas on paper: Make sure to capture the ideas on paper so that the group can return to discuss the ideas at a later point. People are going to want to feel like there was progress made, and if everyone leaves without anything to show for it next time, well, that's not much fun.

• Review within the week: While the ideas are still fresh go through and categorize the ideas by short-term and long-term goals. This way you know where to head first. From here committees can be formed and the rest is history.

Brainstorming: (option 2)

In this option there are three changes:

• Form a problem that has to be answered: This is critical because ideas that are formed will center around this problem as a solution.

• Shout out ideas and write them down on the chalk board.
  

• Choose a rating scale: On a scale of 0 to 5, how relevant is each idea to your problem? Keep the 4 and 5 rated ideas on the top of you list and put aside the 1 through 3 ideas. Now you have your focus.

Remember to also: choose and audience, have a time limit, and review your ideas.