Reflection Paper 2

Team Forgotten

 Reflection Paper #2

 Brainstorming on a Stormy Day

             Brainstorming is defined as allowing groups to generate more ideas or solutions to problems than individuals might generate working alone. For this second reflection paper we will be focusing on the process of brainstorming as it applies to our group fundraising ideas. 

 The first step of brainstorming is when the members of the group write down their individual ideas. In our case, we vocalized them and had one of our group members write them down. It took us approximately 20 minutes to generate enough fundraising ideas to create a goal. Our first idea was to host a bake sale on the quad. We believe that there are enough people around that will want something scrumptious to eat between classes. Next we discussed what items to sell at our bake sale. We also talked about whether or not to make them ourselves or to buy them from a store. We decided that it would be best if we did both. That way we wouldn’t spend a lot of money/time and we could still make a decent profit. In terms of when to host our bake sale we concluded that around noon to mid-afternoon would be optimal. This is the time when most people are going to lunch. We want to attract students and faculty when they are at their most hungry.

 Another idea that came up through brainstorming was to sell pizzas by the slice to students on campus. As midterms approach people are looking for a quick snack. Selling pizza is a great way to make a profit. 

 One of the best ideas that we came up with were the donation cans. We will refer to them as Jingle cans. We intend to put a bunch of jingle cans in various businesses across the greater Bloomington Normal area. These cans were provided by the Jingle Bell Run people and will likely be our highest source of donations. Our key locations for jingle cans will be Hooters, Culver’s and McDonald’s if they are willing to help us out. 

 During the course of our brainstorming we tried our best to allow any and all ideas to be heard. We made sure to not shoot ideas down without first considering every aspect of that idea. This way we could elaborate on all our ideas. Once we had a pool of ideas that we had created we were able to select the best ones to use in our fundraising project. </o:p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:26px;"> We built our main ideas for this project off of each other’s ideas. As one person would come up with a small simple idea, the others would continue to build upon it. We first had the idea of a bake sale and from that we decided to sell pizza to people which is an unusual idea. According to, Effective Small Group and Team Communication, Proponents of brainstorming suggest that members try to think of odd ideas, “the crazier, the better,” and that they build one idea on another(74). This is an example of support influencing the outcome of an idea. This helped us encourage each other to be creative and vocal in the brainstorming process. </o:p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:26px;"> The entire process of brainstorming was very apparent in our group. All of the steps of this concept were incorporated into our final set of goals. We agree with the texts ideas about this process. All of the aspects became evident in the early stages of our idea generating. We learned that it is important to collaborate on ideas and support one another to reach a desired point of cohesiveness. At this point it’s hard to say how understanding brainstorming will impact our future small group experiences. But having a better understanding of it will certainly make things easier for us in future interactions.