Traverse the landscape of the mind by walking: an exploration of a new brainstorming practice

TL;DR

This paper explores walking as a novel practice for group brainstorming, suggesting it can enhance participation, sustain mental energy, and be as effective as traditional methods, opening new avenues for idea generation research.

Contribution

It introduces and preliminarily evaluates walking-based group brainstorming, a novel approach that may improve participation and mental sustainability in idea generation sessions.

Findings

Walking can lead to effective idea generation.

Walking brainstorming encourages equal participation.

It helps maintain sustainable mental energy.

Abstract

Group brainstorming is a well-known idea generation technique, which plays a key role in software development processes. Despite this, the relevant literature has had little to offer in advancing our understanding of the effectiveness of group brainstorming sessions. In this paper we present a research-in-progress on brainstorming while walking, which is a practice built upon the relationship between thinking and walking. The objective is to better understand how to conduct group brainstorming effectively. We compared two brainstorming sessions, one performed during a mountain walk, the other traditionally in a room. Three preliminary findings are obtained: walking can lead to an effective idea generation session; brainstorming while walking can encourage team members to participate in and contribute to the session in an equal manner; and it can help a team to maintain sustainable mental energy. Our study opens up an avenue for future exploration of effective group brainstorming practices.