About a month ago Ideachampions.com posted a great article on brainstorming.

Quite rightly they recognised the importance of the facilitator in determining the success of a brainstorming session.  Really helpfully they identified the different personas that a great facilitator will need to master.

Want to take your brainstorming session to the next level?  Have a look at this list and see where you could improve:

• Conductor – helps everyone in the room play their part
• Alchemist – finds gold even when it just looks like lead
• Dancer – flexible and able to change direction skilfully
• Mad scientist – tries the crazy thing
• Diamond cutter – gets to the core without loosing value
• Actor – fully into the role, enabling others to engage
• Environmentalist – passionate about recycling any idea, even apparently irrelevant or bad ones
• Office of the law – enforces the boundaries in order to keep everyone free
• Servant – does not use the session as a platform for their ideas
• Stand-up comic – helps create the right atmosphere and releases some great ideas

Why not head over to Idea Champions for the original article.