The ©Cure for Brainstorming Blues

  Almost every project will include brainstorming of some kind at some point in the project lifecycle.  Brainstorming sessions can be a powerful gateway to unlock solutions, make issues visible, prioritize actions and bring experienced minds together.  When individuals come together as a team, innovative ideas can be born.  One of the struggles of being a part of a powerful and productive brainstorming session is that they generate many great ideas and often reveal a large amount of issues.  This can leave a group feeling overwhelmed.  Often times, the wide array of ideas can be hard to organize, understand, validate and act on.  Worse yet, many members of a team might leave feeling invalidated, unheard or completely shut down. 
  

  In the 1960’s Mr. Jiro Kawakita began developing a powerful tool that today is part of the seven management and planning tools.  The tool was coined the name, the affinity diagram.  Affinity as a noun means a similarity in features, characteristics or other defined attributes.  It suggests a relationship or a strong resemblance.  Of course, we’re all aware that a diagram is just a simple drawing that shows the appearance, structure or workings of something in a schematic representation.  After breaking down those two words it is much easier to understand that the Affinity diagram is a powerful tool that can be used by a team members or individuals during a project.  The diagram itself makes the perfect analytical tool that teams can use to organize ideas into subgroups with common themes or relationships that have been revealed during a brainstorming session.
    Over the years many different methods of using the Affinity diagram have been developed and used.  We hope that as you borrow from the ©CURE Methodology you will do the same.  All tools should be improved and innovative in such a way that meets the needs of the user.  The ©CURE Methodology provides a simple structured way for users to extract a large number of ideas from a group, organize ideas, problems and possible countermeasures into a group as well as prioritize and group themes.  If you’re going to pull a group of people together for brainstorming the ©CURE Methodology is the method you’ll want to use.

What is the ©CURE methodology?
 
  The ©CURE methodology began as a simple four step process to facilitate a brainstorming session and has since been used to assist in analyzing and grouping ideas generated from team or group settings.  While the affinity diagram is a powerful tool, the ©CURE Methodology transforms the tool into a methodology that can be used repeatedly with successful results.  This is very important in both group and individual settings.  You don’t want to jump from 3 steps, to 4 steps and then 6 step methods when you’re facilitating a brainstorming session.  Structure and consistency without restrictive elements helps people get results, time and time again.  As a means of standardizing the affinity diagram we created a mnemonic so that anybody could lead a brainstorming session while systematically and effectively gathering the ideas, data and thoughts in a simple format.

How is the ©CURE methodology performed?
 
  The ©CURE Methodology is performed in 4 steps, shown below.  Although the online course has not yet been released, it is currently in development.  To help you remember these 4 simple steps of the ©CURE Methodology we have made the photo shown below into a poster.  You can download your poster for free by clicking on the photo.

Click here to develop your free reminder of the ©CURE Methodology.

  As you can see the ©CURE methodology is a simple and easy way to facilitate and harness the power of everyone’s ideas.  The name itself, ©CURE methodology is indicative of what it actually does, empowers teams to generate powerful solutions and find themes.  The ©CURE Methodology can be used by anyone.  As with any other facilitation technique the ©CURE methodology does take a bit of experience and practice in real life.  Over time you will see just how powerful the method is.  Try using the ©CURE methodology next time you have an opportunity for brainstorming and be sure to keep your eyes open for the upcoming ©CURE Methodology course online.

For more information on facilitation techniques, email us here!