The second area to focus when finishing a brainstorm is Amplify – that is, improve your average, mediocre and marginal ideas by merging ideas together, adapting or editing them, or force-fitting elements together to create a unique third idea.
Here’s the three steps to amplify when finishing a brainstorm:
Clean-up the flipchart pages
- Ask the group to help bring order to the flipchart pages.
- Quickly review and fill in any words left out when writing the ideas down on flipcharts.
- Remove unneeded flipchart pages.
- Go through all pages and circle/highlight the 3-5 words which encapsulate the concept behind the core ideas, good or bad. I prefer to use an entirely separate colour or a bright highlighter to visually separate the core ideas from the messy notes
Analyse all ideas, looking for …
- Any repeating ideas. Link these ideas using your pen or highlighter.
- Ways to combine or connect unrelated ideas to form more complete or whole ideas.
- Ideas which need to be brainstormed further, researched or tested.
- Any Big Ideas, or provocative ideas which warrant more attention.
Select the best ideas
- Distribute the creative criteria to the brainstorm participants.
- Give everyone a few – purchased from an office supply store – and ask them to judiciously select only those ideas which fit the criteria. People should have 3-4 dots in a small brainstorms, or 5-6 for large ones.
- Once finished, look in order at the ideas with the most dots for further discussion.
FYI: This post is the second in a series on . The two companion articles are and .
Any other thoughts to add on improving your ideas in brainstorms? Please add your comments below.
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