By Volunteer Barsha Bharati, FHI Hyderabad
Our brain always keeps pondering upon ideas. Ideas to explore, create, share or innovate. But most of the ideas are only in our brains. We never work on it. When we see someone else has executed it, we realize we miss the opportunity to work on it. It must happen to you several times. Sometimes we do a little more. Like we plan to write, to outline the ideas, study, research, and discuss among our circles. But still, after some days, we work on another idea and leave the first one behind. That’s why; it’s called, Writing is Writing. By writing down ideas on sheets, we are subconsciously connected to them. Planning and executing them on paper create a state of mind to do it. Then, every time we share and discuss our research, we add more points to the paper and the idea gets refined. According to E.L.Doctorow, “It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Rohrbach’s 6-3-5 session is the most followed brainwriting activity followed by organizations. But I really like the way we do. When we plan for FHI Bhubaneswar events, our city coordinators, Uddhavi, Soumya, Aman, get the outlines of the theme of the monthly event from FHI and share it with our volunteers on the WhatsApp group. We have enough time to think. We are not in rush to compromise on the quality of our ideas. A specific time and date have been fixed to come online and discuss it with the group. Volunteers write all their ideas and plan of execution, materials of reference, and also share a digital demo, if possible, in the group. We appreciate each other’s feedback and finalize how to execute the events. Sometimes we voluntarily pick up or co-ordinators suggest and distribute responsibilities among us. This September, it’s going to be my second anniversary with FHI. And I have never seen any events failed because of poor planning or executions. Both our online and offline events’ success rate is more than 100%. As we are working together for a greater cause, every bit of a successful event motivates and drives us to do more by keeping clarity of our goal in our mind. For us, Writing is an exploration. We start from nothing and learn as we go.
Brainwriting is a simple, effective, and the best way to come up with a wide variety of creative ideas. With Brainwriting no idea is lost because of a quick change of topic or because someone hasn’t spoken loudly enough. It allows shy or quieter members of the team to contribute comfortably without feeling pressured to raise their voices. It also helps them slowly by growing their confidence day by day as their ideas are great to hear. As all ideas are written down, there is no chance to be missed. If they aren’t right for that particular project for which ideation session is going on, they can be banked for a later project. It helps to promote reading. To bring thoughts to paper we need to have enough research, vocabulary, and logic to defend its executions and solutions to raised questions. I really agree with Maya Angelou’s words to mention here because maybe that’s why brainwriting has a little more impact than brainstorming. Although together they both create magic.
“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”- Maya Angelou
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