guide to help you and your team to engage and come up with ideas for change

1. © ABCi 2019
What is Brainstorming?
Brainstorming is a technique to encourage
creative thinking. It aims to generate a list of
ideas that may be solutions to a specific
problem, question or issue.
What are the benefits of using this tool?
Brainstorming enables you to pool the experience and creativity of the whole team. The benefit of
group brainstorming is that you are able to ‘provoke’ new ideas through discussion so that those crazy
ideas move towards something that might be more practical to start testing. Everybody’s voice is heard
so it’s great for team-building too. This technique may be used in conjunction with convergent thinking
techniques such as Affinity Diagrams and Ease / Benefit Analysis to organise and prioritise ideas.
Who needs to be involved?
Include anybody who is involved in the process that
you are looking out. This could include staff,
leaders, service users or key stakeholders – This
may be done in groups of between 5-10 people to
allow space and time for discussion
What resources do I need?
• Flip Chart
• Post It Notes & pens
• Wall space or flipchart stand
• Comfortable environment
• 15-20 minutes
BrainstormingABC
improvement
iSkills for
When would you use this?
Brainstorming may be used when you want
to generate lots of ideas to solve a problem.
It may be used as part of a ‘Snorkel’ process
to generate, organise and prioritise ideas
How do you do it?
Step 1: Describe the process briefly to participants. Outline the problem under discussion and ask
participants to generate as many ideas for solutions as possible. The wilder and wackier the better – it
is important that no ideas are filtered out at this point.
Step 2: Give participants quiet time at he start of the session to write down as many of their ideas –
one idea per post-it note. This often takes around 5-10 minutes and there is no limit to the number of
ideas generated
Step 3: Ask people to outline their idea as they place it on the
flipchart and facilitate discussion in order to provoke new ideas
or move ideas elsewhere
Step 4: See also Affinity Diagrams, Ease / Benefit Analysis
Improvement Skills Guides to organise and prioritise your ideas
NB – Alternatively – ask each person to come up with a new
idea and keep circulating participants until the ideas run out!

2. © ABCi 2019