238 - Transforming Brainstorming Sessions into Effective Workshops with Alexandre Eisenchteter

How can we make an informal brainstorming session, full of possibilities and quick thinking, into something more formal… without squeezing the life from it?

Alexandre Eisenchteter believes deeply in the power of brainstorming sessions — and that most of us undervalue them. It’s a fair point: the prevailing view does seem to be that brainstorming is a chaotic and unstructured process. But, when Alex is facilitating, the opposite is true.

When facilitated with care, brainstorming can provide us with a deeply collaborative and creative approach to problem-solving. Alex explains his approach and how you can adopt it in this episode.

Find out about:

• Why brainstorming is an untapped goldmine for facilitators
• What many of us get wrong about brainstorming
• How to use a number of different tools to optimise and enhance your brainstorming session
• Why it can be such a struggle for clients to translate the outputs of a workshop into day-to-day changes
• How an initial ‘scope meeting’ can prevent misalignment further into the workshop process
• Why good things happen when we stick with ‘bad’ or unpopular ideas for a little longer
• How to prevent a workshop being a mess of ideas and, instead, a greenhouse for big changes 

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Links:

Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.

Here is the link to the scoping questions:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jSLxBnI0Jtbq_WRQ1raEBtRveSwuOn6-sFuFCLYBaKw/edit?usp=sharing

Connect to Alexandre:

On LinkedIn.

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👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/  👈