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 

Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.

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.

Support the show:
Make a one-off donation and contribute to the ongoing costs of running the podcast.

Any thoughts? Share them with us!

Support the show

✨✨✨

If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/