Polishing and Refining your Ideas
In order to successfully make a decision about the ideas proposed during your brainstorming session, the next step would be refining your ideas.
Refining your ideas will allow you to narrow down your list to the idea most fulfilling to your objectives. However, keep in mind that all steps below cannot be applied before the brainstorming session is over!
The 7 steps to refine your ideas are:1
- Emotion: Refine your ideas based on people’s reactions, usually known as the “WOW” effect, read the ideas written on post-it notes and keep aside all the ideas which all or most of the participants agree on.
- Benefit: Refine your ideas in light of their benefits, evaluate the benefit(s) of each idea, the more benefits the idea yields the better it becomes.
- Drawback: Refine your ideas in light of their drawbacks, be realistic and evaluate all the negative points associated with your idea, try to choose ideas that will be applicable to implement.
- Facts: Refine your ideas with facts and figures, this is where CEOs and managers will step in so be ready to defend your ideas with facts and figures.
- Strength: Refine your ideas by upgrading initiatives, you can do so by adding other complementary ideas to remove any obstacles to implementation, or to simplify the original idea so it could be easily understood.
- Testing: Refine your ideas based on testing: creating a simple prototype of your idea and testing it may reduce uncertainties and most probably will increase its chance to be accepted by top management.
- “Pre-plan”: refine your ideas into a plan, try to develop a proposal for your ideas, the outline of the proposal will differ depending on whether you’re proposing an idea for a new business, product, service, process or system design. Define your idea and start drafting your proposal accordingly.
1Innovative Thinking, W.Warner Burkee, Judge James Tamm, Business Consultants, Inc.
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