Tips on Brainstorming (OL Approach)

This article is available at QuaSyLaTic Knowledgebase

A large corporate is organizing a business planners forum to deliberate on strategies and objectives for the coming years. Several breakout groups, each 8 number of people with an appointed internal facilitator, are arranged to brainstorm and deliberate together for a day.

A large number of the participants had been trained in 3-day workshop on “Organizational Learning” conducted by this QuaSyLaTic for the past 1-2 years.

The organizer invited this QuaSyLaTic to give a 30-min briefing on “Tips on brainstorming” with the view of reminding people to make use of the disciplines and tools learned at “Organizational Learning” Program.

What is of significance this initiative on the part of the organizer to invite this QuaSyLaTic to give this briefing is as follow:

For the last two years, close to 200 executives and higher management staff have been trained in Organizational Learning. But there were little practice of the disciplines and tools in the day to day operation of the business. Just like most training programs, learning stop at the end of the training sessions. For this organization, efforts are made to organize twice a year “OL Convention” where senior members present their business issues using systems thinking loop and mental models.
• - But then the prevailing mental models is : OL is applied during OL convention, not day to day life.

This time, there is a breakthrough in mindset on the part of the organizer. The new thinking or new mental model could be as follow:

There is a gathering of minds of large group of organization members to deliberate on business strategies and objectives. We need to employ the theories of Team Learning to produce effective and fruitful conversation to produce the intended results.

OL, a set of learning tools, is no more confined to OL Convention, but can be applied to every aspects of individual life and organization life. It is not an activity by itself but fundamental human competencies to help to produce intended results, whether in the areas of HR, HSE, Marketing, Production etc.