Idea Generating Chart

Practice: A name for a new DI school

Have your team members practice their idea generating abilities with this simple, fun activity. This is a good activity for early in the season. It will help your team members to learn to work collaboratively and develop a name for a new DI school. You will need a large floor space for this activity.

Idea Generating

Hand out three copies of the Idea Generation Chart to each team member.

1. Over the next several minutes, your team will generate ideas for a name for a brand new DI school. No one should talk during this stage of the process. Have the team members write down their ideas for school names on their papers. Each idea should go in a separate cell of the table.

2. In this stage, the ideas don’t have to be fully formed. Encourage fluency of ideas, and have the team members write down anything they can think of as soon as they think of it.

3. After the team cannot generate any more ideas, have the team members cut their charts apart on the dotted lines. Each team member should have a stack of his or her ideas.

Idea Focusing

1. Begin the Idea Focusing stage by having one team member present each of his or her school name ideas, one at a time, so everyone else can understand them. After each idea is presented, the team member places it on the floor in full view. After the team member’s ideas are all announced, the presenting team member should quickly group the ideas into similar topics. For example, sports teams might be a group and plants might be another group.

2. Have the other team members follow by presenting their ideas and grouping them. They can group their ideas with ideas from other team members.

3. Have the team discuss its favorite ideas or groupings.

4. Each team member has three votes for his or her favorite groupings. Make note of the votes, and you’ll have the ideas ranked by popularity!

This tool combines generating and focusing into one exercise and can be used to create ideas for many topics. It is not just for deciding on a school name. After team members have practiced using this tool, have them try generating and focusing ideas for different elements of their solution (theme, location, technical element, etc.).

😊Team Manager Tip: Remember, this process is very fluid. Your team can return to generating ideas as often as necessary, even after the team has focused their ideas. For example, team members might generate new ideas after seeing other ideas from their team members. Have them record and share any such ideas. For this activity, work toward finding a DI school name, but don’t force the team members to pick a school name if they can’t agree