• Getting Them to Listen is Not Enough!
• Using Conflict to Create More Compelling Content
• Getting More Out of Brainstorming Sessions
• Conducting More Productive Meetings
• How To Create An Air Coaching Plan for 2004
• Does Your Morning Show Content Make the Grade
• Making time to Praise
• My morning show could be much more compelling
• 10 Steps to more effective radio air check and critique sessions
• Changing Air Personality Performance Behavior
• Improving the Creative Process at your Radio Station
• Air Talent Coaching Tactics that get results
• The Difference Between Speaking and Being Heard.
• The Morning Show as Improv
• American Culture Post 9/11
• Coaching Air Personality Development
• Building Better Time Spent Listening
• How to Increase Audience Passion for Your Radio Station
• Techniques for Managing Air Personalities New to Radio
• Maximizing News On a Music Radio Station

The first step to improving the outcome of your brainstorming sessions is the environment. Offices with desks, a couple of chairs, e-mail and ringing phones do not stimulate creativity. Sameness is also the enemy of creativity. So, even your conference room, as is, may not be the best possible environment for your brainstorming sessions.

Experts say that the level of visual stimulation available to people impacts on their abilities to create. According to psychologist Rachel Kaplin, of the University of Michigan, workers stuck in windowless rooms, even if they are well lit and modern, are more easily distracted, less flexible in their thinking, more impulsive, less able to solve problems, and more irritable. So, in a perfect world your meeting space would have lots of windows, lots of natural light and a spectacular, inspiring view. However, you may not always have such a perfect environment available to you. In that case, you can always improvise.

In his early days as Marketing Director at Procter & Gamble, creative guru Doug Hall had an inner office without a window. All it had was an indentation in the wall, with a curtain, where a window had been one time before an office addition was built. He used it to hang travel posters as his personal visual stimulation, changing his view daily. One day he put up a beach on the Riviera, the next day an Artic tundra poster and the next one depicting the Irish countryside. Another important part of the brainstorming environment is the attitude and actions of those involved. Ban negativity of any sort from your brainstorming “cathedral.” One negative person can ruin a brainstorming session. Instruct the group that there are no bad ideas and discourage them from worrying about execution problems or financial concerns in this phase of the process. In the brainstorming room there is no past, no company, no boss, no restrictions, no FCC or any other possible encumbrance to prevent your ideas from becoming reality.

Fun is a critical element in the creative process. It is a fact that people are the most creative when they are having fun.

Fun is a critical element in the creative process. It is a fact that people are the most creative when they are having fun. In an article written for The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Alice Isen of the University of Maryland described a study on the correlation between fun and problem solving. She studied two groups of college students who were shown two different video tapes and then given some creative problems to solve. The first group saw a five-minute clip of bloopers from the old TV shows Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel and The Red Skelton Show. The students in the second group were shown a math video called Area Under A Curve. The students who saw the funny bloopers were 300% to 500% more likely to come up with successful solutions to problems they were asked to solve than those who saw the boring math video.

One way to introduce fun into your brainstorming meetings is by bringing along some toys. Children do most of their learning through playing with toys. When we become adults we often lose touch with that inner child that sees things as brand new and with endless possibilities. Playing helps access the part of our brains which controls the creative process. At Doug Hall’s creative training center the Eureka! Mansion, he takes toys very seriously.

There he has an off-road go-cart course, three pinball machines, hundreds of yo-yos, an adult-size swing set, several cases of Silly String, a white-sand volleyball court, a monster swimming pool and hot tub, thousands of whoopee cushions, a mountain of Play-Doh, plenty of bubble pipes, and an arsenal of Nerf toys and high-power squirt guns. Doug’s favorite way of loosening up his corporate clients is by attacking them with the Nerf Master Blaster which shoots eight foam balls in rapid-fire succession. His clients quickly pick up Nerf weapons of their own, the battle wages on, inner-children emerge and stuffy defenses go down.

Music can also help stimulate creativity in a brainstorming session. In his book, Jump Start Your Brain, Doug Hall says, “TV theme songs are particularly effective; they’re so ingrained in the collective psyche that they stimulate the ‘shared-experience’ nodules in our brains, making for more effective teams.” He says, after years of experimentation, he has yet to find any music better for triggering creativity than the Jeopardy theme. Or a melody more effective for generating child-like playfulness than the chorus from Gilligan’s Island.

It is important to keep changing the perspective in your brainstorming sessions. Looking at an issue from only one angle can make you blind to other possibilities. You can change the perspective of the meeting by changing the music, introducing a new toy and taking breaks to refresh people’s minds. However, one of the most effective ways to change the perspective of your brainstorming session is by posing a new question to the group.

Doug Hall uses some of the following questions to lead him to new associations:

• What would be the simple solution?
• What would be the most outrageous solution?
• What would send fear into our competitors’ hearts?
• What would arouse curiosity?
• What would make your boss, your company, your co-workers extremely uncomfortable?
• What would draw coverage from the Wall Street Journal?
  The Weekly World News?
• What would be the most far removed from the competition?
• What would attract heavy users?
• What would bring new consumers to your category?
• What would bring you the competitions’ best customers?
• What would turn your weaknesses into strengths?

Encourage open participation and a kind of organized chaos. Draw out those who are not as active in the process. They tend to be the least experienced people in the room and that gives them the freshest perspective. Sometimes the newest people at the station have the most brilliant ideas. They just don’t have the confidence of those who tend to dominate meetings.

Bring lots and lots of paper. Dry erase boards get recycled and ideas can be lost if you use them. Make sure someone is writing down all of the ideas with different colored markers on big sheets of paper on an easel that is easy to see. This provides the group with visual stimulation for new ideas as well as a record of all of the ideas that you can archive.

At the end of the brainstorming session ask the group for a recap. What was the best idea to come out of the meeting? Which is the first one we should act on? Which one will we probably not act on? This allows you to gauge how cohesive the group is and if you have consensus on key ideas. When you do not complete this phase of the process you fail to identify any dissension or disagreements that may cause you problems in the future.