Brainstorming State Forever...NOT

The situation I’m in at the moment is quite incredible. As you know, I’m starting a business at the moment. Most of my time is spent developing my coaching product for managers and leaders. This is great, but boy is it hard to keep the focus! I’m overwhelmed by ideas:

“Oh, yes, I could do this. But look, there is this other thing that can be done! And oh! I need to do this as well but then this idea is soooo interesting!”

Well, you now see the picture! It is so easy to get excited about lots of things and in the end accomplish nothing! One can generate thousands of great ideas and do nothing about them. What will that person gain in the end? That person will gain nothing, of course.

The fact is that it is OK to be in a brainstorming state for a while, but at some point, you need to get out of that state. If you remain in the brainstorming state forever, then you know you will get a lot of brainstorming data that will sit still, not helping you accomplish your goals. But how do you get out of that state? How do you make sure that your brainstorming ideas turn into a real acomplishment at the end?

There are several ways you can go about getting out of the brainstorming state. But I think it all comes down to the following recipe. First, after all your thinking and mental wandering, you need to re-state your goals and objectives to make sure that you will be going in the right direction. It is possible that your brainstorming allowed you to see your goals more clearly or even change them altogether. So re-state your objectives to create that focus that you need and to add perspective to the set of ideas that you have in front of you.

Second, you need to clean up the vast amount of ideas that you generated while brainstorming. Some of these ideas that you had in the middle of the night either do not make sense anymore (even though you thought they were sparks of supreme intelligence that night J) or are simply not aligned with your goals. You need to toss them away and keep only those ideas that bring you closer to your objectives. And for the good ideas, you will need to put them in order. Maybe some are useful now; maybe some will be useful later. Maybe some ideas are good but need to be refined.

Third, the goal now is to come up with a vision of where you want to go and how you will get there. You have to look at all your good ideas, the ones that you kept, and come up with a mental picture of how they will play together to achieve your goals. This is the crucial step. You are creating the framework for your plan.

Once you have that clear mental picture about where you are going and how you will get there, capture it somewhere. This is your new vision of the future. It defines your focus for the future. You are now out of the brainstorm state if you stick to your plan. Of course, you will likely have to refine your vision, adapt it to the reality of the day, and create a realistic plan to achive your vision. You might even find yourself going back to a brainstorming state for a while as you refine your plan or adapt it. But you should do it in the context of this original vision to make sure that you move forward instead of constantly spinning your wheels standing still.

A good trick to make sure that your plan will stick is to come up with a list of short term goals. This will give you an early sense of accomplishment! But... this is a topic for a later post as this has the potential to become a very long discussion!

So, do you also feel that getting out of the brainstorming state is important? Do you usually find it tough to get out of that state and keep focusing on the task at hand? Do you think that this plan for getting out of the brainstorming state would work? Please let me know what you think!