Just a quick thank you to everyone who attended the "Creative Problem Solving" workshop at the 2006 ProjectWorld/World Congress for Business Analysts Conference in Orlando, Florida last week.  I had a great time and I hope everyone learned a little something new to take back home.

** Random Quote for Week of November 13th, 2006:

"Don't think.  Thinking is the enemy of creativity.  It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy.  You can't try to do things.  You simply must do things." - Ray Bradbury

** Brainstorming Works "Conceptlet":

What is it about the group brainstorming process that seems to work so well?  Although there are literally hundreds of idea generation techniques, each with their own special variation on getting great ideas out of the heads of individual participants, brainstorming remains the most popular because it works.  It works in generating a large number of ideas using the rules that Alex Osborn created over 60 years ago:
      

• Defer judgment
• Be outrageous
• Demand quantity over quality
• Combine and build on ideas
• All ideas are accepted, even the most ridiculous

Of course, there are other techniques designed to acheive more targeted results and classic brainstorming has its drawbacks, but the "old standby" just seems to keep on producing great ideas.

If you look at the conventional view of how our sub-concscious problem solving ability works, where the functions of sensory recording and then using those recordings to match problems with potential solutions are applied, it is easy to see where individual idea generation takes place.  However, it continues to be my contention that group brainstorming works so well because when you combine a common problem statement with the sensory recordings of each individual participant, recordings that are as unique as our own fingerprints, you leverage a collective set of experiences, opinions, thoughts, ideas and potential solutions.

Put simply, group brainstorming works because we each have different lenses, based on our unique experiences, through which we view problems.  These different lenses provide an infinite amount of unique ideas generated for a particular problem set.  To enhance this "uniqueness" even further, ensure that you have a broad and diverse set of participants in your brainstorming session.

In future "Conceptlet" entries, we'll look at some of the more popular variations of "classic brainstorming" that are specifically designed to produce more targeted problem solving results.