The Idea Blitz activity is generally the starting point of most Stormz workshops. In essence, it allows the team to generate many ideas in a very short time frame.
The problem is that if you don't take precautions, you will end-up with disappointing ideas. This is a classic pitfall, in this first place people will simply give ideas that they have on top of their mind. So what should you do?
- Engage discussions at the end of the idea blitz session
At the end of the activity, attendants should spend time reading each others ideas and speak about some of them. In order to do so, you could pick-up a few ideas and ask for people to react about it.
- Run idea blitz several time in a row and change perspectives
Of course, you should run as many Idea Blitz activity session in a row as necessary to get the amount of items needed to proceed to the next activity.
More than that, you should drive the session by focusing each idea blitz activity on one of the existing ideas in order to generate new ideas with a specific perspective. This enables you to go from superficial ideas to more creative ideas.
Example: you are looking for fun ways to go from home to office. In the first round of Idea Blitz, one of the idea was “helicopter”. Not really creative? Well, you are going to use that idea as the basis of the next Idea Blitz session and ask the attendees “to generate ideas of transportation means that don’t touch the ground.” There you will have a bunch of creative ideas such as “Superman suit”, “Magnetic levitation bus” or “aerial tramway”…