(Entrepreneur) — How do you lead a brainstorming meeting? First, forget about the box that, according to generally accepted brainstorming practices, you’re supposed to be thinking outside of. The problem with the box is that no one knows how big it is. One person’s box could be tiny, another person’s box could be big. (“Let’s go to another room. The box is too big.”) Someone else’s box could be so big that inside of the box is everything–including reason, judgment and sanity. (“Dear God, what a box.”)  Anyway, the box is stifling. It turns a discussion into an exercise. (“Is this ‘outside the box’ enough?”) And the box denies crucial truths about brainstorming: that there is a goal, and that because of time and money there are always limitations on discussion, even from the very beginning. The box is silly.  The only box to be concerned with is the room you’ll use for the session. Which is what this is about. There are ways to brainstorm while not “co-locating,” as the sociologists call it, but this is not about that. This is about being in a room with other people.

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(Fast Company) — Coming up with good ideas is a major part of your job, so you want to have the right tools on hand to generate as many ideas as possible during a brainstorming session. Here are some tools and techniques for doing just that. When you want to do free-form thinking and gather ideas and tasks around a central concept, try a mind map. In the middle of the page, write down your topic. Then, all around the topic, jot down tasks, words, ideas, and connect them by drawing lines between them and branching similar ideas off of them. The most effective offline tool for mind mapping is probably a classic whiteboard, wet marker, and eraser. To mind map online, check out MindMeister.com, a free Web app where you can create, share, and publish your maps. The advantage of mind mapping is that it’s not linear bullet points, and because it’s unstructured it can encourage more free thinking.

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