Business Education - Meeting Preparation and Brainstorming Techniques (Idea Quota and Idea Production)

The following techniques are useful to use to help have more effective and productive meetings and brainstorming sessions.

The 1st technique, Idea Quotas, involves setting an Idea Quota and writing down ideas immediately after the brainstorming session. The 2nd technique, Idea Production, involves forcing participants to brainstorm about the problems and issues before coming to a meeting. Specifically, each meeting participant would review the agenda topics and bring 3 ideas for how to solve the issues or problems to be discussed to the meeting.

Idea Quotas

• Intention / Concept - Create a more effective brainstorming environment by:

• Being open
• Withholding judgment
• Setting an idea quota
• Writing ideas down immediately after the brainstorming session
• In this instance, we had a 40 minute brainstorming session during which we were to come up with at least 40 ideas regarding ‘ways to make our wedding unique’

• Lessons Learned

• Open mindedness and writing things down has a positive effect on brainstorming
• Having a target number idea quota number to hit is definitely useful as you are guaranteed to walk out of the session with a specific number of ideas
• It is very difficult to not want to immediately evaluate ideas instead of just writing them down. We needed to remind each other not to judge many times throughout the experiment.

Idea Production

• Intention / Concept - Prior the meeting/brainstorming session regarding sorority recruiting, the meeting organizer sent a message to each participant asking them to:

• Read the agenda / request
• Come up with 3 new ideas for how to improve the recruitment plans that were made last spring
• This is a straightforward technique that forces participants to brainstorm about the problem before coming to a meeting, so that everyone has already thought about the topic and is ready to participate in the brainstorming session.

• Lessons Learned

• It is great to have people come with ideas to meetings so that time isn’t wasted getting everyone’s minds warmed up. People are already engaged before they step into the meeting and are therefore more likely to participate.
• This process allows them to gather their own thoughts before providing them to the group and building off of the group ideas.
• It made for a much more fruitful brainstorming discussion because the “idea production” gave everyone the opportunity to participate by forcing them to put some effort forth and prepare prior to the meeting. As a result, everyone already had “skin in the game.”