By: Chuck Frey
Often, the brainstorming process is followed by a lack of action. This one-page action plan is a fail-safe way to bring an idea to life.
Often, the brainstorming process is followed by a lack of action. Here is a practical process that you can use to keep your creative momentum going and bring your ideas to life:
- Define your challenge well. Narrow down to find one particular issue to brainstorm on.
- Brainstorm: Be sure to use a creative thinking activity and solo brainstorming first.
- Select two to three of the best ideas and create a one-page action plan for them (explained below)
- Implement your ideas, using this action plan.
The one-page action plan
Take a piece of paper, oriented in landscape format. Along the top, write the idea for which you’re creating an action plan. Under that heading, along the left of the page, put one bullet point at the top, one in the middle and one at the bottom. Now, decide on the timeframe in which you’d like to implement your idea. Say, for the sake of our example, it’s six weeks.
At bullet point number one, write down one thing you can do in the next week to start to bring this idea to life. Next to that, add the initials of the person who will take that action, and a date by which they must complete the action (obviously, seven days from now).
Next, go to the second bullet point. Write down one thing you can do in the next three weeks to start to bring that idea to life. Record the initials of the person to whom you have assigned that idea, and set a deadline for its completion.
Finally, next to the last bullet point, list one thing you can do in the next six weeks to bring that idea to life, and add the initials and a deadline date, as you did with the other two bullet points.
Now you have a one-page action plan that will help to ensure your best idea comes to life within your timeframe. It sounds very simple, but the fact is that it works!