Brainstorming Tools

10X GameStorming: Brainstorming with Big Changes in Mind

@joe_edtech

This blog post is really a reflection of a bunch of great ideas that were hatched by several different people and then brought together and improved upon by still more people. In otherwords, it's really about the power of group collaboration. 

Several weeks ago I attended what I hope was the first of many Illinois Google Education Leadership Summits. A couple of guys from Google were there and they were demonstrating some of the activities that happen in the "Garage" on the Mountain View campus. The "Garage" for Google is a little like Microsoft's Hackathon centers, it is a place designed to facilitate group thinking and tinkering.

While we were there, they talked about the goals of their brainstorming sessions, inspired by the 10 X Rule recently written about by Grant Cardone. From Cardone's book cover, "While most people operate with only three degrees of action-no action, retreat, or normal action-if you're after big goals, you don't want to settle for the ordinary." In other words, don't just imagine change - take whatever change you've imagined it and make it 10 X bigger. At the Summit in April someone made the point that the alternative is to plan for incremental change. But if you do that you will only get incremental results.

After talking about the goal for a bit, the Google Edu team shared with us one of their methods. They called on strategies from a website called "Gamestorming" (but actually is http://www.gogamestorm.com/). On it's Wiki page, Gamestorming offers a tremendous list of brainstorming activities that you can try. The one we practiced with that day, and that I have since used with a great deal of success, is called, "Start, Stop, Continue." The activity begins by having participants reflect and write on practices in their organization that they would like to see started, those that should be stopped, and those that should continue. Collaboration in growing concentric circles leads a couple of big ideas to bubble up and reach a critical mass in the group.

This is actually the time of year when hope for even better things in the Fall starts to build. Is there a group that you work with on a regular basis that you can challenge to think not of the safest baby steps you can take for next Fall but of bigger things - maybe things that are 10 X better? And what kind of conversation could you have if you asked every member of your group, PLC, team, or classroom what they would like to start doing, stop doing, or keep doing? 

The conversation might be life changing.

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If you have a great brainstorming technique you've used with success, please tell us about it below.