Brainstorming

Free-form brainstorming is great, provided you only want ideas from confident people.

Unfortunately, it leaves many good ideas unspoken.

To involve everyone, structure is needed. Here are two fantastic approaches you can leverage.

Brainwriting gathers ideas through writing. Everyone spends five minutes silently writing ideas on an index card. When the timer rings, cards are circulated to the left. Over the next five minutes, you read the card you received and add more ideas to it. This process repeats until the cards are filled.

The 1-2-4-All method is a more collaborative approach. Participants start by writing down ideas, before forming pairs for joint brainstorming. Next, groups of four work together to compare notes and narrow down to a few interesting ideas. Finally, everyone joins together and shares the top ideas. This approach works well over Zoom using breakout rooms.

If you haven’t tried structured brainstorming before, you’ll be amazed at how many more ideas have surfaced.