101 Activities For Teaching Creativity And Problem Solving

3. Have each individual read aloud, in turn, one of his or her ideas.


4. Tell the other group members to write down, on a Post-it, any new ideas that
   might come to mind (one idea per note).


5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4 until each group member has read aloud at least one of his or
   her ideas. If you want more ideas, have them repeat the round.


6. Instruct the groups to collect and group the ideas into categories of related
   themes, using a flip chart or a wall.


7. Ask the participants to form new groups of two or three people, brainstorm ideas
   for the themes at their new tables, and write the ideas on Post-it®Notes, one idea
   per note.


8. After one hour or less, ask each group to sort its ideas by themes and present
   them to the larger group. Write down these ideas on a flip chart or overhead trans-
   parencies visible to all.


9. Have the participants form new groups of ten people, brainstorm ways to
   improve the ideas listed, write them down on Post-its (one idea per note), and
   place them on flip charts for evaluation.

Debrief/Discussion

This exercise introduces several “wrinkles” into a brainwriting/brainstorming process

that should yield a fairly large number of ideas. It takes advantage of the strengths of

both brainwriting and brainstorming while mixing up group composition.

This latter feature can be effective to keep groups from becoming stale and to continu-

ally bring in new perspectives. A downside to changing group composition is that groups

that are “clicking” together and cranking out ideas fluently could be broken up and lose

their productivity when combined with others.

Also consider having participants debrief using the following questions:

• What was most helpful about this exercise?


• What was most challenging?


• What can we apply?


• How would you rate the value of this exercise to helping us with this issue?


• Will this exercise be helpful in the future for other sessions?


• What did you learn?


• What will we be able to use from this exercise?


• What ideas were generated, and which ones were most interesting?

Brainwriting with Related Stimuli 339

101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving.Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley &

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