Asian Technology - Brainstorming Sessions Move From Blackboard to PC Screen
By JEREMY WAGSTAFF
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
If, like me, you're still recovering from the excesses of the season, you might not be ready for this -- but I'd like to discuss brainstorming.
I've always been somewhat suspicious of the concept, harboring visions of meetings where people say things like "I'm thinking revolving yogurt spoons for senior citizens" and the decibel level of contributors is in inverse proportion to the quality of their input. The results are usually determined less by their brilliance than by the approaching lunch break.
It needn't be quite this awful, even on a full New Year celebration stomach. Technology can help. Trust me.
Enter Visual Concept from the northern England-based Center for Management Creativity, founded by John Varney (www.cmcsite.com). It is a program designed to aid individual or group creativity, and is an offshoot of the center's decade-old involvement in fostering business creativity and innovation. In essence, the program entails using movable shapes to encapsulate ideas, which are then shuffled and linked to each other to form clusters, or arrangements of ideas.
This, you may think, doesn't sound very revolutionary. It isn't. But where Mr. Varney has the edge over similar products is that the simple, visual approach of his thinking naturally lends itself to computers in ways that, say, the mind maps of creative-thinking guru Tony Buzan, don't.
What the Center for Management Creativity has done is to transfer its whiteboard-based approach to software. And it works.
In a nutshell, it goes like this: Get your brain-stormers to throw out ideas and assign each of them to a hexagon -- the preferred shape in that they lock onto other hexagons easily, but don't box your ideas in. Then, when the brainstorming session is exhausted, cluster those hexagons together where obvious links exist and watch as relationships that weren't previously clear gradually make themselves apparent. Of course, you could do this on a whiteboard. But a computer screen is a natural fit for this kind of brainstorming since it allows much more flexibility to move things around, alter shapes, add links and mix colors on the fly. Not all relationships may be direct, for example, which is where more complex couplings can be used or links added to other objects or files.
Admittedly, this all takes some getting used to. I tried out the concept on a range of issues, including my New Year's resolutions and thoughts on the general direction of technology (not on the same sheet, mind you) and found some interesting things about myself I'd rather not discuss here. I'm sure that in a group environment, and with practice, the approach would pay big dividends. I'm a big fan of mind-maps, where branches of related ideas are rooted in a central concept (see the excellent Mind Manager at www.mindman.com). But I found Visual Concept more flexible in some ways, since it allowed me to throw out ideas of all kinds without having to assign them any sort of relationship with each other, or hierarchy, in brainstorming jargon.
Both programs share some key attributes: They are very well designed, very robust and very flexible. Visual Concept has the look and feel of a top drawer program, which probably helps justify its $400 price tag. But it's a pleasure to see software properly thought through and written. If I had quibbles, they would be minor ones. In some cases, there are one too many steps in assigning text to a shape -- that can get in the way of free-flowing thought. In others, I'd like to be able to easily switch colors for a series of shapes without having to alter each one separately.
These are small grumbles. This software can help ease those brainstorming blues and actually assist you in thinking instead of obstructing you. It dovetails beautifully with other programs such as Microsoft Word, and comes with serious, in-depth tutorials that should set you on the way to innovation and creativity. Indeed, I'd love to see some crossover between this and mind-mapping software, perhaps exploring three-dimensional space. Who knows, it may even put an end to those "I'm thinking solar-powered legwarmers for household pets..." type conversations.
Write to Jeremy Wagstaff at jeremy.wagstaff@awsj.com
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