The Ultimate Brainstorming Exercise! (10 Minutes Long)

in this video I'm gonna show you exactly how to run the perfect brainstorming exercise that lasts only 10 minutes and can solve almost any problem it's a perfect replacement for meetings that go on forever and ever and ever and it's it's super simple have you ever been in a meeting that seemed like it was going on forever and ever and ever and ever and you know you came together to solve a problem or come up with ideas but you left feeling like oh god that was so pointless and you know actually the end of the meeting was we're just gonna have another meeting well that's normal because team dynamics are pretty broken and meetings generally feel pretty frustrating and one of the reasons for that is there's just no systems and structures for getting things done for actually running these types of meetings and in this video I'm gonna try to show you one it's a brainstorming exercise for coming up with ideas as a team but coming up with ideas as a team without speaking to each other and without unstructured open messy discussions I'm gonna show you how to bring it one-hour meeting down to just 10 minutes and I really really hope you like it now while you're watching this video if you've any comments if you've any questions let me know down below I will answer them which we answer pretty much every comment we get so thank you so much so do write them down below pause the video we'll write it down below if you've any questions and let's jump in the video today I want to show you just one simple exercise that's built for doing nothing but brainstorming and helping you figure out which ideas sort of in a room are the best ideas so you can just move on okay so let me show you what happens if you don't use an exercise like this but you get a group of people together who are trying to solve a problem so let's choose a problem let's say we're trying to come up with a hypothetical scenario team a team is coming together because they want to think about how they might redesign the common area of their office to make it more collaborative okay so I'm gonna write that as a how might we and if you don't know about how my we's watch your channel because we do a lot of this kind of stuff and how might we is just a good way to kind of formulate a challenge so let's say the team is coming together and their challenge is to make the kitchen or make the common area more collaborative okay make common area more collaborative okay whatever okay so I'm sticking that up here so that's the challenge you have to zoom in a lot to see that yeah that's gonna be grainy zoom right in on that one tell them okay so the team comes together let's get them up on the board so they're all sitting around the table you know we've got Dave we've got Sarah we've got Brian we've got Laura we've got Calum god I don't know Dom now here's what happens usually they all get in the room together it's like hey we want to redesign the common area of our office so let's do it we have an hour we have one hour to do this now here's what happens here's if you've been in a meeting before you don't you'll know what's about to happen so Dave says and I'm while I'm going through I'm gonna actually give them names Dave so they've got one hour and these people are sitting around the table so Dave says alright I've got an idea what if we made like a library the in the collaborative area so like we're talking about the kitchen what if we put up a library of all the books that we like and then Laura is like oh yeah cool yeah what if we also had some like some bean bags what if and then like Tim is like oh cool yeah we could also and you know what why don't we have like a kind of open plan kitchen thing and Rachel's like hey we could also have like a Nintendo switch so we could play Mario Kart together this is gonna be a great way to get you know people to come together and they're all valid ideas but what happens is they're now in an open conversation right they're all saying stuff they're all saying these ideas and maybe people are taking notes maybe someone's writing stuff down but everyone's taking notes differently and what happens even in this simple situation where they have a fun task to actually come up with ideas still at the end of the meeting if they're managed to get to an end point at one hour all they have is a bunch of ideas and nothing really to execute on and actually you know Sarah has already forgotten what Rachel said thirty minutes ago Rachel also forgot what she said thirty minutes ago this is not an optimal way to share information this is not an optimal way to brainstorm so what I want to show you is how to do the same meeting much more efficiently in fact instead of one hour we can get it down to ten minutes maybe you have fifteen minutes but I want to show you a really great way to turn a messy meeting where you're trying to come up with some ideas into something a lot more structured and to do that we're gonna use an exercise called ten for ten maybe he'll put tens in my hands ten for ten okay so you can have ten top ideas oh you know what another problem here just related to that is that yeah let's say they have like 50 ideas coming out of this session people can only remember about five or six but no one really knows what things should be executed because there's no priority when you use ten for ten you're gonna have a prioritized list of ten ideas that you're gonna be able to run through by the end of the exercise now since we're not gonna do a normal AJ in smart style video it's just me in the room we're not gonna show you how this workshop works like by doing some b-roll I'm just going to describe it to you as best I can but this is a really really really simple exercise okay so the first thing you're going to do is the most important thing is gonna choose a facilitator okay so you never do a meeting without a facilitator it's just crazy okay so Sarah is the facilitator okay Sarah is gonna facilitate this workshop and how it's gonna work is Sarah is gonna give everyone first of all she's going to turn like the challenge the thing that's in the meeting name okay the meeting name might be called kitchen redesign she's gonna stick up on the wall hey this is what we're working on we're working on how might we make the common area more collaborative let's just remind everyone in the room this is what we're working on then she'll give everybody a block of post-its so I'm gonna get a block here she'll give everybody a block of yellow square sticky notes I guess I shouldn't say post-its because I'm not like you know getting any money from them sticky notes okay so Sarah gives everyone a block a post-it note the next thing she does is says hey everyone has five minutes that's five minutes and using this is a time timer it's a great way to you know that everyone in the room can see how much time is left everyone's got five minutes to write as many ideas as they can one idea per post it in legible handwriting without discussing with anybody else this means that Rachel and Tim and Amer Laura Sarah Dave are all alone sitting at the table but not speaking writing ideas one idea proposed it so for example if I was sitting at this page at this table I would be writing okay so library okay so I also want to think we could have a large common table okay maybe I'll also have think we could have an mariokart okay so what I'm doing is just writing one post-it one idea per post-it so at the end of the five minutes every single one of these people will have a pile of ideas they'll just have a pile of post-its with ideas written on them and now the facilitator is going to say hey everybody you now have one minute to choose your favorite 10 ideas from your pile of ideas so for me this would mean looking through all of my IDs and just choosing 10 that I think are the strongest and I throw all the rest of them away still no one has shared any ideas with anyone else everyone's just working alone so you've just got your own ten ideas and you haven't shared them with anyone yet the next step is super super simple all everybody does everyone on the team at the same time gets up and sticks their post-its on to a whiteboard or onto a wall it doesn't matter sticks they're ten chosen post-it so in this case there's one two three four five six there will be 60 post-its on this whiteboard and by the way as I said we usually have b-roll for this but it's a week where we just need to do a lot of video so whatever you just have to imagine it so I'm sure you have a lot of b-roll for this maybe you need to find it whatever so at the end you have 60 post-its on the wall they are not categorized and yes there are duplicates but it doesn't matter okay it does not matter so let me just recap what's happened so far everybody has spent five minutes writing as many ideas as they can on individual post-its without discussing then everyone chose 10 that they specifically think are the strongest of their piles and then they stuck them all up onto a wall or a whiteboard doesn't matter just stuck stuck them all up together randomly remember these post-its are not anonymous they're all mixed together nobody knows you know that this is Dave's idea that this is Laura's idea that this is a Murs idea and still there's been no discussion and the workshops just been going on for like six minutes which is really cool okay so the next step gets exciting next step Sarah gives every participant including herself if she's part of it ten dots and asks them to spend three minutes voting on which ideas they consider to be the most interesting solutions to this challenge so they're not voting on which one they think will definitely work and which one everyone will like it's which one they subjectively think are the best ideas now here's the voting rules they can vote on their own ideas if they really like something they can put like four or five votes on it if they want so you know if these were my ideas stuck up on the wall here or not my ideas but if these were some examples of ideas and I'm like oh I really really liked this one then I could put like three or four voting dots on it it doesn't matter so without any discussion people are voting and reading and voting and reading and voting and that's basically it and after the three minutes are done everyone should get rid of all of their dots and now the facilitator Sarah arranges these voted ideas in order of priority so the one that has the most votes is on top so this one has like five votes this one had these ones have for this one you get the idea so basically you reorder everything that's on this board in order of which ideas were the most interesting so the goal here is just to get to a sort of a top ten so you can ignore pretty much ignore every vote that's below oh by the way wait now it's ten so you can see it's like going to be ten post-its at the end so you just try to take off the top ten voted post-its put them in order of you know this was the top voted maybe there's even two top voted it doesn't really matter this has five votes this has four votes this has three votes it's just a simple prioritized overview so the end goal is really that the team can see okay so these are ten ideas that the whole team thinks is interesting these are you know what it's doing is replacing the conversation with a visual output so instead of everyone talking and talking and talking for an hour in the space of ten minutes you now have a visual overview of which ideas the team thinks could be the best ideas and you know what the meeting could end there and you could have a look at how to execute these things maybe that's not the best ending to the meeting there's other workshops you can add on top of this to really decide how to execute but the goal of this meeting the goal of this exercise that I want to show you is there are other ways to come up with ideas without speaking to each other no one has spoken to each other yet and now they all have a visual overview of which ideas could be the strongest candidates that's a better starting point for the meeting in the first place you know this could be the point where the meeting starts and we say okay so these are sort of the ten big ideas we have let's think about what ways we might execute them or you move them into another exercise for prioritizing which will we'll show you another time and that's 10 for 10 a really simple note and vote style exercise which involves nobody on the team talking which requires just one person two volunteers the facilitator which requires pretty much nothing besides some sticky notes some dots and some sharpies that's really it I hope showing you this in this style which is quite rough for the aging smart style helped you to understand how to run a simple brainstorming exercise this is my favorite brainstorming exercise we use this all the time at AJ and smart and I hope you love it so if you liked this type of video this type of workshop video more hands-on practical video do let me know in the comments I want to know what types of videos you want to see us making here at AJ and smart we try a lot of stuff we're trying to see what you like best so if you do like this video and you do enjoy this content make sure you also check us out on LinkedIn make sure you also check out my podcast every Monday it's called Jake and Jonathan there's so much stuff out there there's so much workshop information being a workshop consultant that's literally my job I have so much to tell on this topic if you're interested so linked in the AJ and smart page over on LinkedIn my podcast Jake and Jonathan are Instagram for daily vlogs of us working with clients that kind of stuff if it interests you make sure you check it out finally help the YouTube algorithm gods find our videos by hitting like leaving a comment and subscribing thanks so much for watching and thanks for supporting AJ and smart and see you next 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