101 Activities For Teaching Creativity And Problem Solving

Related Activities

Idea Diary [6]

Procedure

About one week before a scheduled brainstorming session, provide the following
instructions for all participants to do every evening:

Set your alarm clock to awaken you 20 to 30 minutes earlier than usual in
the morning.

Note what time it is when you wake up and quickly begin writing down ideas
about some problem. As you list your ideas, suspend all judgment.

Continue writing ideas until you can’t think of any more. Then note what time
it is.

The next morning, repeat these steps, but try to spend 5 more minutes writing
ideas. If you run out of ideas before the 5 minutes is up, keep writing whatever
you can think of, even if the ideas seem impractical.

Review all the ideas and try to transform the impractical ideas into more practi-
cal ones, writing them down in a notebook or as a word processing file.

Convene the meeting of the groups and tell the group members to take turns shar-
ing one of their three best ideas from the past several days.

Ask the other group members to try to build on or improve this idea and to write
down any new ones on Post-it®Notes, one idea per note.

Repeat this process until all ideas have been shared or time runs out.

Tell them to write down any ideas on Post-it®Notes (one idea per note) and place
them on flip charts for evaluation.

Debrief/Discussion Debrief using the following types of questions:

In general, how well did this approach work for you as individuals?

Were your ideas better than they normally would have been without the time up-
front?

Did you have trouble clearing your mind on first awakening?

Was there any change in the quality of the ideas over time?

Also, consider having participants debrief using the following questions:

What was most helpful about this exercise?

What was most challenging?

What can we apply?

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