Debrief/Discussion
This activity obviously was developed years before email became a common way of com-
municating. Computer technology now makes it possible for organizations to collect
ideas via intranets. According to Business Week,IBM demonstrated the power of global
brainstorming over the Internet when it received ideas from thousands of international
employees (November 24, 2003). Organizational Brainstorms differs in that it requires at
least one idea per day for a month. Nevertheless, new technology makes this exercise
almost obsolete. The new emphasis in many organizations is on “idea management,”
where companies use enterprise idea management software to solicit and process ideas.
(One of the leading companies in this area is Imaginatik.com.)
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?
Variations
- Alan Pearson (1978) has used this activity with one significant variation: participants
proceed as just described, except they exchange their notebooks with another person
after two weeks. Tell the participants to use the ideas in the new notebooks to trigger
additional ideas over the remaining two weeks. - Another variation is to collect the ideas daily via email. It then would be relatively
easy to share all of the ideas with the participants on a daily basis. The result might be
a greater idea quantity.
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101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving.Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley &
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