Brainstorming

Often when you are faced with a decision or task, like deciding what needs to be done before introducing organisational change, your mind can fill up with ideas with no obvious pattern or you can be at a total loss as to where to start.

In a mind dump you write all the ideas that come into your head as fast as you can, without worrying about quality or order. This can help you generate ideas, discover what you already know about a topic and helps clear the mind. Then you can come back, sort out what is really relevant to the task and then get the ideas into a suitable order. You will also find out if there are any areas that you will need to do some more research into.

A brainstorm is very similar but happens with a group of people.

You have to decide what needs to be done before introducing organisational change. You approach this task by first doing a mind dump of all the possible actions. You then categorise the ideas/actions into things that you can do and those that you can't do. At this point you may find that some of the ideas that you wrote down are not achievable, these could be deleted. You might also put the ideas into a logical order, probably using a priority of what needs to be done first.

Now you are in an excellent position to start planning how to implement your actions.

Brainstorming diagram.