Welcome to the Conduct Effective Brainstorming Sessions course. This program will equip you with the knowledge, structure, and facilitation skills required to design, lead, and manage productive brainstorming sessions that generate high-quality ideas and support innovative problem-solving. You will explore the psychology behind creative thinking, the methods that help participants move beyond habitual patterns, and the structured techniques that transform brainstorming from an unproductive conversation into a purposeful, results-focused process. This course also emphasises planning, participant selection, idea generation, evaluation, and implementation to ensure that brainstorming sessions contribute meaningfully to organisational decision-making and continuous improvement.
This course begins by examining what brainstorming is and the significance of Alex Osborn’s four rules of brainstorming in shaping a safe, open, and generative environment for idea creation. You will explore how to think outside ourselves and how the two stages of thinking—divergent and convergent—work together to support creativity. This section also explains the reasons for crossing from the operational to the creative cycle, the role of associative thinking, and why most brainstorming fails to produce meaningful results when these principles are not applied effectively.
The next learning area focuses on planning and preparation. You will explore how to plan the session, how to assemble the brainstorming team, and who to include to maximise diversity, relevance, and creative capability. This section also explains how to define the task clearly so participants understand the challenge, why brainstorming works best with constructed problems, and how to transform or loosen the structure of a problem to reveal new possibilities. You will also examine why some problems are ill-structured and how this affects the design of the session. This section guides you through how to draw up a timetable, how to set realistic idea-generation targets, and how to vary the format of the session to maintain engagement and creative momentum.
A further learning area explores facilitation techniques and the tools required to support creativity. You will examine how to use both individual and group brainstorming, the venue and equipment needed for a productive session, and how to explore and factor the problem so participants can approach it from different angles. This section also introduces the associative “How to’s”, methods for generating ideas, how to use an oracle to provoke unexpected insights, the use of metaphorical thinking, the analogy game, identification techniques, and reversal techniques. You will also explore the rules that govern the Task as Understood and examine how to decide which technique to use and when.
The next section focuses on sense-making, refinement, and selection. You will explore how to select ideas, how to use intuitive judgement appropriately, how to cluster ideas into meaningful categories, and how to rank, rate, and vote on ideas to narrow down the most promising solutions. This section ensures that brainstorming outcomes are captured, prioritised, and translated into clear, actionable next steps rather than remaining as unorganised suggestions.
The final learning area focuses on developing, testing, and implementing solutions. You will explore how to develop the preferred solution, how to evaluate its feasibility, and why the success of any solution depends on other people’s acceptance, support, and involvement. This section introduces the use of force field analysis to identify supportive and opposing forces, how and why you should identify a sponsor to champion implementation, how to map out a practical plan of action, and how to conduct a failure prevention analysis to reduce risk and strengthen solution robustness.
By the end of this course you will be able to design and facilitate structured brainstorming sessions, guide participants through creative and analytical thinking, use a wide range of idea-generation techniques, prioritise and select high-value ideas, and develop implementation pathways that increase the likelihood of successful, organisation-wide adoption.