Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi everyone my name is Adam Montandon and in this video,
I'm going to show you how you can boost your brainstorming.
Now if you are creative, you have probably done plenty
of brain storms and it can be a really good way
to get lots of different new ideas. But sometimes brainstorms have problems.
They can be ineffective, they can be boring,
they can create ideas that just not realistic and
sometimes brainstorming by itself just isn't working for you.
So I'm going to show you two little things that you can do
to really boost your brainstorming.
Now these ideas sound simple, but in practice they can be a little bit complicated
so make sure that you try this out a few times with your team's
on ideas that are not so important before you get to using them
on your big projects.
The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to iterate our ideas
the second think that we're going to do is we're going to look at two
different methods of thinking. Iterate ideas
means not just coming up with lots of new ideas but improving
on your ideas throughout the brainstorming process.
I'm going to improve not only ideas, but putting them through
a two-stage process. Brainstorming is normally just at one stage process
when you come with lots of ideas you write down in a sheet of paper
and that's it. But in this two-stage process we going to flip
how we think through each iteration.
So what that means is we're gonna think in two different ways.
The first way that we are going to think is called divergent
thinking, and divergent means going big, going wild,
going crazy. It means the blue sky thinking
coming with also some new ideas where the sky really is the limit.
When you doing this divergent thinking, you're breaking all the rules you don't
care
about budgets or limitations, you just want to curl up with any ideas that you
think are cool
and are amazing. You don't have to worry if they are realistic
or think it ever exist in the real world, just come up
with as many cool, crazy, wild, wacky ideas
as you possibly can. Once you've gone through that divergent wacky, crazy face,
you wan't take things a little bit more seriously. So we go to the second phase
and that's called convergent thinking. Convergent thinking
means when your ideas come down to a single point,
where we can start to look at all the problems with
your ideas. The best way to think about convergent thinking
is when somebody says be realistic and that's what convergent thinking is
all about. It's about coming up with the right answer,
not the most crazy answer. So when you are doing convergent thinking,
you are going to think about all of your limitations. Do you have the skills to
create your idea?
Do you have the budget? Do you have the time frame? Can your idea possibly
exist? Is it realistic? That's what convergent thinking
is all about. Now I'm gonna show you how we use both divergent
and convergent to give your iterations to our ideas
in the brainstorming process. How I like to start
is with timer and I like to set a timer for five minutes
and you can use five minutes or ten minutes or however long you like
but five minutes works well for me. In the first five minutes
I work with my team in divergent face,
coming up with lots wild and crazy ideas, then
for the next five minutes I flipped with my team
to convergent thinking. We'll think about all of the restrictions,
all of the problems, the deadlines, the budgets, anything that can go
wrong and just find out why these ideas might not work.
In that face, some of the ideas pass the test
some of the ideas don't, some of them kind of
of half pass the test and what I do then
is I take those ideas and those restrictions through into another
divergent face. So I try to think
crazy and creative, but within the framework
all the limitations, all the problems, the real world restrictions
that I might face. one sucked on them I caught with lots of different crazy ideas
and bring them back down from divergent
interconversion again to find out which one is the most realistic,
which one is the most likely. So every five minutes,
you're going to want to be flipping from thinking outside the box, thinking crazy,
thinking
divergent, just from thinking smartly to thinking for strictly,
just thinking conversion things. This is because it's not always the most crazy
ideas that win,
but crazy ideas that are realistic, crazy ideas
are doable and you can use this for any
kind of situation. Imaging, for example,
that you're trying to plan the perfect holiday
with your friends and you decide that in your wildest dreams
in your divergent phase if you were coming up with crazy ideas you think wow
it would be so great to take a vacation for the entire year,
that would be wonderful, that will be the best time ever, but then
when you think convergently, you realize that it's not so realistic to
spend an entire year
on vacation. I mean most people spend just a couple of weeks on vacation.
You'd never get the time off work and it would be so expensive
and you know could you really do a yearly vacation
and then you might think well that maybe a bad idea
then maybe you take it to the diversion face again and say what crazy stuff
could I do to have a year-long vacation?
Maybe I could travel and work abroad in a different country.
maybe I could find a job to do. Maybe somebody could pay me. Maybe I could
become a travel blogger
Maybe I could do something that would mean a willing to travel
work and live out there a full year. You might come up with five different
crazy ideas how you could spend a year on vacation
Then you might go to the conversion phase where you start to look at all the
restrictions.
So if you want to work in a certain country, what are the visa requirements,
what are the problems that you're going to run into with the government and the
tax implications and
all this kinda stuff there's probably a million different rules and regulations,
but once you know them, you can narrow down your options
to certain countries that you can go to visit and spend the year completely on
vacation
So ideas that might seem ridiculous at the start
can become more realistic when you spend a few minutes in the diversion face.
And a few minutes in the convert face. This works for
absolutely any creative process and it could work as well
in your personal life. So I'd really like it if you give it a try
the next time that your brainstorming. Please let me know
how it goes. let me know what you think of this video, because it really means a
lot to me.
To hear your feedback, so please don't forget to leave a comment
like it share it with your friends thanks see you next time.