Brainstorming Brunch

After meeting up with Aruna and Aditya and conceptuatlizing toghet in Bombay and Agra, we went to Delhi with the mission of throwing our ideas at a broader audience to see what they thought. The basic idea was we were thinking of setting up an organization to facilitate low-income urban communities to aspire and create their own responses to the challenges they face.

How do you engage other people in brainstorming and critiquing a set of ideas that are really in the very prime stages of conceptualization? Since we couldn't compare it to any experiences we had had personally, we approached it as a learning adventure.

We started off by putting our discussions on paper, individually and collectively. Using 3A (instead of 3M) sticky notes and newspaper (Aruna's idea) we tried to arrange concepts and more concrete ideas together, categorized into idea spaces that when looked at in series displayed a process of what the organization would do rather than an end result or output.

Our work faced real-life, and mixedly-welcomed distractions. Specifically the World Cup of Cricket was in its semi-final and final match, with India ultimately winning it all. As well as Aditya and Aruna's niece, Janeli.

Slowly we arrived at some consensus for a framework to display this process and got to work making around 10 poster papers filled halfway with sticky notes.

The empty halves of the posters were reserved for participants in our upcoming Brainstorming Brunch to fill in as they saw fit. The Brainstorming Brunch was an event we invited people we knew personally who were more friends than acquaintances. Tiffany, Luan, Agnes, Dhananjay, and Sumitra ended up attending.

As we had anticipated soliciting brainstorming and critique on the conceptual process of an organization/project from a diverse set of backgrounds is hard to do in a way that the participants are clear on what is going on and the outcome is useful for the facilitators. Reflecting we realized that we were trying to communicate conceptually when we should have focused on communicating concepts in a more concrete way, with clear outcomes of the Brainstorming Brunch. The people who came were great and we were lucky to have access to a free space to work in. And in the end it forced us to struggle with communicating together to other people, even if it was difficult, to begin to move beyond internal conversations into creating external discussions.