Impact Learning

The activities in the Top Ten lists will help you get many ideas for a broad spectrum of challenges. However, you may want more help than these lists provide. For instance, you might have specific needs for new product ideas or for ways to handle various people problems. You might want an activity that doesn’t require much time but has the potential to generate a fairly large number of ideas. Or you may want an activity that can help energize a session while generating ideas as well. To help, I’ve put together a technique selection guide to help you make more informed choices about different activities.

This guide reflects my subjective choices based on my knowledge of and experience in using the activities over twenty-five years. Once you experiment with different activities, you may want to develop your own guide, or at least make your own judgments about which ones work best for you and people you facilitate or train.

The activities in Chapters 4 through 12 are described in the selection guide in twelve different ways:

• Individual vs. group: Indicates if an activity originally was developed for use by either or if a group method originally designed for groups also can be used by individuals. As noted previously, ALL of the individual activities can be used by groups, but not all of the group activities can be used by individuals. If all or most of your training or idea generation involves groups, then this distinction is not relevant. Any of the activities will suffice with respect to this distinction. However, the individual-only activities obviously can serve a training role in helping individuals learn how to apply the activities as individuals.

• Brainstorming vs. brainwriting: Classifies each activity as using verbal idea generation only, written only, or a combination of both. As discussed previously, brainstorming activities involve verbal idea generation while brainwriting involves the silent, written generation of ideas in a group. Afew of the activities classified as both will appear within a chapter on either brainwriting or brainstorming. The classification, however, is based on the primary emphasis being on either brainwriting or brainstorming. For instance, Brainsketching [94] requires participants to draw pictures as individuals and then pass them around the group. The pictures then are used as stimuli for participants to use in brainstorming ideas.

Some research suggests that brainwriting—regardless of the stimulus source—may outperform brainstorming. Thus, unrelated brainwriting activities have the highest theoretical potential to produce hot ideas. Note that the operative word is “theoretical.” The best may represent all categories, depending on the user and the problem.

Taken From : Pfeiffer 101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving