What is Brainstorming?
Whether it’s crafting a presentation, writing an essay, or planning your day, we’ve all engaged in brainstorming at some point. Brainstorming is a fast-paced process where you generate and sift through numerous ideas to solve a problem or create something new. This process can often feel chaotic, and understandably, chaos can be intimidating.
What’s the first word that pops into your mind when you think of chaos?
Messy, overwhelming, uncontrolled. Was the word you thought of similar to these? This is a common reaction, and it’s natural to want to avoid these feelings.
However, there are other words that come to my mind as well: exciting, activated, creative, innovative. Most people don’t associate chaos with these words, but hopefully, by the end of this lesson, you will.
What if the key to unlocking awesome ideas actually lies within chaos? To illustrate this point, let’s take a quick peek behind the scenes at how the AiCE course was developed.
Chaos, right? But it’s within this very chaos that some of the most brilliant ideas are born.
Divergent Thinking: Letting Ideas Flow
Chaos allows our minds to explore freely, embracing what’s called divergent thinking. This is a way of thinking that seeks to generate as many ideas as possible, moving in various directions to explore different solutions. It’s about not limiting your creativity but letting all sorts of ideas flow, no matter how crazy.
Miro, a popular virtual whiteboard tool, is excellent for facilitating this type of thinking. It allows us to throw ideas onto a limitless canvas, using notes, images, and diagrams that can be moved and connected freely. The visual nature of Miro helps to see connections between ideas that might not be obvious in a more structured format.
Here’s a quick introduction to Miro’s capabilities:
Convergent Thinking: Making Sense of the Chaos
The true magic happens when we start organizing these ideas, a process known as convergent thinking. This phase is about refining, categorizing, and prioritizing ideas to find viable solutions to the problem at hand.
Miro’s AI capabilities can significantly streamline this process. Miro has a built in AI tool called Miro Assist that can organize and group related ideas, summarize key ideas, create presentations, and more. This helps transform the raw creative output of divergent thinking into actionable plans.
Now, let’s put this into practice. Try creating a Miro board to brainstorm a project you’re passionate about. Use divergent thinking to populate the board with every idea that comes to mind, then apply convergent thinking to organize these ideas.
Using the reverse brainstorming technique in Miro
Harnessing the Power of Creative Chaos
While chaos in brainstorming might seem daunting, it is a fertile ground for creativity. By leveraging AI tools like Miro, we can harness this chaos, allowing us to generate innovative ideas and refine them into practical solutions. Remember, the journey from chaos to clarity is where true creativity thrives.
