- Your Slip Is Showing [90]
- The Shirt Off Your Back [101]
Procedure
- Give each member of a group a pad of Post-it®Notes and pens or pencils.
- Tell each participant to write one idea on a Post-it®and pass it to the person on his
or her right. - Instruct the group members to read the ideas on the Post-its they just received and
use these ideas to stimulate improvements or entirely new ideas. - Tell them to write any improvements or new ideas on new Post-its and pass them
to the persons on their right. - Allow this process to continue for about 10 to 15 minutes.
- Call time and ask group members to sort the Post-its into categories of similar
ideas for evaluation. Tell them to do this on a table, a flip chart, or a wall.
Debrief/Discussion
This is one of the original brainwriting activities developed in Germany and one of the
most popular activities in use today throughout the world. It is a natural complement to
brainstorming and should be used whenever at least 15 minutes of time is available.
Many trainers and facilitators use this approach as a way to kick off a brainstorming ses-
sion in that it can serve as a purging activity to allow participants to share their pre-ses-
sion ideas without having to wait.
Perhaps the most useful discussion question to use with this exercise is to ask partici-
pants to discuss why this method would generate more ideas than traditional brainstorm-
ing or brainwriting activities in which the ideas are not shared.
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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