10 outrageously valuable benefits of brainstorming tools

In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, you need every edge you can get. One that most people tend to overlook is brainstorming tools. These hand-held and software-based tools act as catalysts to supercharge your muse, so you can be at your creative best, on demand.

Here are some of the amazing benefits they offer:

On-demand brainstorming: Brainstorming tools are easily portable, so you can be creative any time, anywhere. This is significant because years of creativity research agrees that we tend to be most creative anywhere BUT out office environment.

Creative blocks be gone: They help you smash through creative blocks and generate ideas when you need them. Your brain works by association. Stimulus response. Action reaction. Give it a bit of creative stimuli, and it will bubble up ideas and inspirations you didn’t even know were there.

Remove your creative blinders: Brainstorming tools help you break you out of rutted paths of thinking, which usually only result in incremental improvements to your creative challenge. Why does this matter? We all tend to take the path of least resistance when it comes to creativity. We stop with the first “right” idea. We prefer incremental, “safe” ideas. But to help our organizations and clients succeed, we need to think farther afield — beyond our well-worn paths of “normal” thinking.

A world of possibilities: Brainstorming tools help you think divergently, considering a much wider range of possibilities and opportunities than you would otherwise. The more possibilities you can imagine, the more you have to work with. You aren’t obligated to implement that totally crazy, out there idea. But it CAN serve as a stepping-stone to a marvelous solution that is just right for your challenge.

Randomness — it’s a GOOD thing when you’re brainstorming: Brainstorming tools inject a much-needed element of serendipity into your creative process. Diverse stimuli — words, pictures, stories and the like — get your brain thinking in new directions, exploring a wealth of possibilities that you wouldn’t normally think of.

Got a good idea? That’s great. Now keep going: Brainstorming tools help you overcome the bias…