Related Activities
- Brain Purge [82]
- Group Not [83]
- Idea Pool [85]
- Museum Madness [86]
Procedure
- Distribute the Post It, Pardner! Handout, review it with the participants, and
answer any questions they may have. - Tell each group member to peel off three Post-it®Notes.
- Have all participants select an object in the room and use it as the stimulus for free
associations (thoughts that can represent anything, not necessarily the original
object). - Instruct them to write one free association on each note and stick the note on or
near the object. - Have all participants from all groups examine the free associations written by
other group members and use them to spark new ideas that they should write
down on new notes, one idea per note. - Ask them to place their Post-its®on a flip chart and evaluate them later.
Debrief/Discussion
This activity combines a number of features, including brainwriting, physical movement,
free associations, and unrelated stimuli. Alone, these features could help trigger unique
ideas; when used in combination, they can increase the number of ideas possible.
This would be an ideal exercise to engage the participants in some discussion regard-
ing its positive and negative aspects and any difficulties they had in using unrelated stim-
uli and free associations to generate ideas. If a large number of participants have trouble
using this activity, you might skip the free associations and use just the selected objects.
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?
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