Time to kick off a brainstorming session. How to do that? – Reminding everybody about how brainstorming works? Focussing people on the topic at hand?
Fortunately, I ran across this nice article “Twitter Strangers” just in time. I re-told the article (admittedly in a creative interpretation), roughly with the following key content: about the tendency to get stuck in the same associations, about the challenge to be really creative and about a simple experiment that shows the value of unexpected contributions. It was just the material I needed to wake everybody up, establish some cliff-hangers and so on to bring some spice back into the heads.
In the workshop summaries, the resulting brainstorming was repeatedly highlighted for its energy level 🙂
For me, this proves once again: The success of any kind of group activity is determined by the ability to put everybody into the same frame of mind.

Image Credit: kevindooley / Flickr