Brainstorming and collecting ideas

- In this video, we're going to discuss how you can use the results of brainstorming as an alternative way to efficiently capture notes. Brainstorming can be done individually, or with a group, and it involves an informal approach to solving problems. It's really a creativity technique that requires you or a group of people to create a list of spontaneous ideas. There are four major guidelines for effective brainstorming. One is to withhold judgement of other people's ideas. This encourages everyone to contribute and think more creatively. Because the ideas are spontaneous, and sometimes just random, it usually makes brainstorming a pretty fun exercise. The second major guideline for brainstorming is to focus on quantity. The more ideas that are generated, the more likely we'll be able to solve the problems at hand. The third guideline to effective brainstorming is that strange ideas should be welcomed and encouraged. These ideas can be created by looking at things from a new perspective, or making different assumptions. The fourth and final guideline is to combine and improve ideas. This can happen during the brainstorming process, or afterward. If you're brainstorming with a group, you need to designate someone as the note-taker. They need to quickly and efficiently jot down all the ideas as they're being stated. As we mentioned before, use abbreviations and symbols to speed up this process. You want to make sure you capture everything. If you're doing this on your own, you still want to take notes quickly so you can keep up with your own thoughts. Sometimes ideas fly in and out of our head, so we need to capture them the moment they come along. If you're working with a group to brainstorm, here's a nice variation that you might find helpful. Everyone in the group sits in a circle, and each person has to write down one idea on a sheet of paper. Each person then passes their idea along to the next person, who elaborates on the idea, adding some more thoughts of their own. This continues until everyone gets their original idea back. At this point, the group will have effectively elaborated on each and every idea. Those ideas can then be submitted to the group leader for analysis. Brainstorming in this manner is an effective way to harness the collective intelligence of the group. It's also a great way to generate a lot of ideas in a very short period of time. You can also brainstorm individually through a number of techniques. One such brainstorming technique is called free writing, which involves continuously writing for a set period of time, without worrying about grammar, spelling, or even topic. This technique produces raw content, which is often unusable, but it has been shown to help writers overcome self-criticism and writer's block. The technique can be used to generate initial ideas on the topic, and is a very rough draft before formal writing. This is very different from typical brainstorming, in that it doesn't produce a list of ideas, but instead a stream of thoughts, in paragraph format. The same brainstorming approach with free writing can be done with free talking, the difference being that you just continuously talk, the downside here being that you aren't writing anything down, but you can always record yourself if you prefer this method. One of the most useful brainstorming techniques involves the creation of something called a mind map, which is a visual note-taking technique that helps people organize their thoughts. Mind maps can be used in a variety of ways, but they usually consist of a central idea with surrounding topics and sub-topics. This mind map is about insurance, and has topics that include property, travel, liability, life, and health. You can also see the sub-topics under property that include vehicle and home. A mind map gives you a nice bird's eye view of the information, so you can see how it's structured. Later in this course, we'll talk about how to use mind maps for specific situations.