BRAINSTORMING FOR THE REAL WORLD_

STRATEGY

May 28, 2018

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5 min read

BRAINSTORMING FOR THE REAL WORLD_

Thinking faster with full confidence with 3 real-life exercices

Most people do not know how to brainstorm, nor are they trained to think fast and be confident in the ideas or solutions they find.

(scroll down if you want to train yourself for free with an online course)

But in corporate environments, we are asked all the time to find solutions for large-scale projects, and jumping into an ideation session without preparing is kind of like running a 10km without training properly.

Unfortunately, neither schools or companies invest in their employees’ main tool – their brain – to address these challenges, but most still expect us to be intuitively good at it.

This is why the sector of creative advertising has developed a series of techniques over the last 6 decades, so as to consistently be able to come up with phenomenal concepts for demanding clients. And this also why the advertising industry now represents a 1.2 trillion dollar market, 12 times larger that the entire film industry.

Brainstorming, in its original form, is a process that relies onto two principles:
thinking fast without any constraints (quantity over quality), and
curation – following a process to guide and improve the confidence in the ideas generated.

By exploiting this strict process of brainstorming – we are offering facilitation of sessions to professionals in high-stakes environments, no matter what field they are in. It is important to understand that brainstorming is not necessarily a group work and that any brainstorming actually begins by learning how to think as an individual first.

The addition of new “thinkers” in a group can actually deter from the goal of coming up with efficient idea. But, with the right process, group work can lead to extremely powerful results, well over what a single individual could come up with. This is why any session starts by training individuals, and then offers them the tools to work collaboratively.

A good facilitation follows 3 steps

1. BURST – thinking faster alone
2. MATRIX – curation of ideas with a decision-making matrix
3. FORMALISATION

and attendees can reach extremely high-levels of thinking in less than 3 hours – while conceiving of efficient solutions to any problem. We are taking about increase of 200 to 400% of ideas generated in less than 3 hours.

The facilitation take 2 different forms:

• A session to ideate on a specific high-stakes project – lasting 3 hours, with intensive facilitation
• A session of training on the tools – lasting 3 hours – to acquire the reflexes needed in the long run

The first format is akin to following a fitness class and being driven by a coach to overcome any personal or collective limitations in thinking.

The coach pushes the attendees to think at a higher level, and also contributes with his personal experience to the outcomes. This is extremely useful when tackling urgent deadlines or high-pressure projects of many millions of euro. The experience of the trainer in this field with startups, advertising agencies and hedge funds has proven to be a life-saver when feeling too close to a wall.

The second format is more of a classic training on techniques; helping attendees absorb and practice with the tools that will help them deliver better results on a consistent basis. We use a pedagogic approach to understand the tools, use them and pass them along – and attendees who later practice with this method are capable of increasing their personal output by more than 400% in number of ideas generated – and to triple their confidence.

Brainstorming is not a magic word, that when invoked brings sudden insights and ideas – it is a formal process used by the most innovative companies in the world, with creative advertising leading the pack.

When our job is to consistently generate high-level concepts, it would be absurd not to have a system to conceive of them. This is why we developed the most advanced training and facilitation for professionals by using and expanding on tools used by millions of designers and creatives around the world.

Whether it is about tackling personal or professional challenges, this method also gives our clients the most powerful tool: confidence in their ability to solve any problem.

Bio

Charlélie Jourdan is a communication strategist with an expansive insight into creating European-wide communication campaigns. As the co-founder and former Creative Director of Old Continent, the Brussels-based Public Communications Agency, Charlélie has worked on over 300 projects in the last 6 years, and he and his team have evolved the communication of clients such as the European Parliament, the European Commission, Google, Intel, WWF and others, with strategic insights and effective creative implementation. He has trained more than 2000 professionals to date in workshops, webinars and speeches on operational communication tactics and strategy.