Keys to successful brainstorming sessions

- [Instructor] Brainstorming is all about generating a mass quantity of ideas. So I want to give you a few tips here before you dive into your session. First, keep in mind whenever and wherever you're doing brainstorming, your focus is on getting the most ideas in the shortest amount of time. With that said, that means there is no analysis work and that will probably be your hardest challenge. Keep participants focused on generating more and more ideas. You want them building on ideas and growing. Keep them moving forward and avoid any prioritization, decision making or assessing whether ideas are good or not. You'll do that after you get those great ideas and while we're using technology in these demonstrations, know that these tools and applications can be done in any team setting. Whether you're in-person, virtual or some sort of hybrid collaboration setup, you can use any one of these tools in this course to not only facilitate but then to actually capture your brainstorming result and that's the key here. These tools help you leave sessions with results in hand. And so yes, in this course, I'm going to focus on various tools to help you get your brainstorming results but I want you to still follow some solid brainstorming practices. You can always learn more on brainstorming as a productive technique with many of these great courses on LinkedIn learning. Now, for this course though, you'll want to consider for the tools that you might use a few things. First, what does my organization already use? Having a tool your participants are already ready to use can help you stay focused on the activity and not distracted by buttons and layouts. Next, you'll want to consider what you're doing with your outputs i.e are these designed ideas that need to be prioritized or is this the starting point of further conversations? Knowing ahead of time what you're doing with the output can help you best pick a tool that facilitates not only the brainstorming but then the continuation of your work. Finally, definitely consider your participants. Do you want them doing everything themselves and really getting hands-on or might you be doing more facilitation in helping them to capture their ideas? The more your participants may be doing, the more consideration you'll need to determine the best tool for the situation. I've actually included a helpful handout to help you see how each of these tools in this course break down to these exact things to help you pick the best tool for your situation. So with these tools in mind, let's jump right in and start generating those mass quantities of great ideas.