As a method to stimulate thinking, brainstorming is widely used in team collaboration projects. However, not all collective brainstorming can produce positive feedback on work. Some brainstorming meetings can indeed make people's brains full of energy and inspiration, but failed brainstorming can make people exhausted. The process creates more questions than answers.
Successful brainstorming not only allows the team to find solutions to problems but also allows team members to feel the creative thinking involved. This article will introduce 10 advanced brainstorming techniques to stimulate the vitality of brainstorming, which can allow everyone in the team to have a more active source of ideas during the brainstorming process.
At the same time, we will also introduce a very convenient and easy-to-use tool for team brainstorming meetings on an online collaboration whiteboard. This software that runs on the browser has rich brainstorming templates and powerful team collaboration functions, which can effectively reduce the difficulties encountered in the brainstorming process.
1. Start with Team Ice-breaking
Before the brainstorming begins, certain team-building exercises need to be conducted to help the group members participating in the team brainstorming establish basic connections. Especially under the influence of the current epidemic, many members have begun to work remotely. These remote team members may not know each other, so starting with a virtual icebreaker activity can effectively reduce the challenges inherent in distributed teamwork.
Taking the Boardmix online collaboration whiteboard as an example, team members can share some life scene pictures on the whiteboard through the shared [Team Ice Breaking Template], which allows us to understand each other better before the brainstorming meeting officially begins.
2. Stimulate Creativity Through Improvisational Play
After having a basic understanding of each other, appropriate games can activate the team atmosphere, which is an effective way for team members to establish connections with each other. By using the [You Draw and I Guess Template] in the Boardmix Template Center, you can quickly break down the barriers between team members, allowing participants to sketch their workspaces, pet images, and even emoticons of the mood of the day on the whiteboard. Through sketch sessions, methods to promote understanding among members.
3. More Positive Feedback
One of the biggest barriers to free thinking is anxiety, which is amplified when ideas are rejected by team members. Therefore, when brainstorming as a team, everyone should be given the freedom to express their ideas. Even if a bad idea is brought up in a brainstorming meeting, it cannot be rejected immediately. The positive feedback from the team can relieve the mental fatigue of team members and inspire them to associate and generate more positive feedback. That's why A.F. Osborne said it's easier to downplay a crazy idea than to come up with a new one.
4. Maintain Appropriate Group Sizes
Two secrets to effective brainstorming are front-line experience and appropriate team size. If team members have no front-line experience, brainstorming will ultimately produce unrealistic fantasies and fail to produce real solutions to problems. One of the effective brainstorming techniques is that the people working together come from different directions and all have on-the-ground knowledge and research on the problem the team is trying to solve.
In terms of team size, too few members may lead to a scarcity of ideas. According to research, too many members will also affect the stimulation of each member's ideas, resulting in a reduction in the number of individual ideas for each member and making it difficult for the team to produce ideas.
5. Change Your Surroundings
When you feel that your ideas are exhausted or stuck in a fixed work environment, or you encounter a creative obstacle, you can consider changing the scenery around you. The work environment is very important for creative thinking, which is why a “creative space” with a rich environment is needed. Research shows that getting out of the office and into another environment can speed up the creation of new neurons in humans.
6. Maintain Independent Thinking
An easy trap to fall into during brainstorming is groupthink, which occurs when a group of people make unwise decisions fueled by conformist impulses. Groupthink is a "creativity killer". Once it penetrates into brainstorming, everyone's creativity will be affected.
However, by giving each member a quiet, independent time to think about the problem to be solved before the formal brainstorming begins, you can involve more members and prevent team members from falling into groupthink.
When working remotely, it is not difficult to achieve independent thinking. Each member takes 15-20 minutes ahead of time to think and record individually, then simply copy and paste their ideas onto the team's shared Boardmix online whiteboard.
7. Ask Innovative Questions
During the team brainstorming process, if you feel stuck on a positive solution, you can also try asking some innovative questions instead of specific answers. This approach allows each member to relax more and discover new solutions.
8. Create a Mood Board
For visual learners, creating online mood boards can be a more effective way to inspire ideas. Boardmix is a professional whiteboard tool for making mood boards. It provides design-rich mood board templates and supports importing pictures, documents, videos, web pages, etc. You can create an exclusive design mood board in just a few simple steps. Come and try it now Try it!
9. Conduct Breakout Sessions
If the team brainstorming process is dominated by a few people, consider dividing the main body of the meeting into smaller groups. By assigning questions to a group of 3-5 people, each member can be fully allowed to speak out. The Boardmix whiteboard supports video conferencing software, allowing it to be compatible with the group discussion function of the conferencing software. With the infinitely extendable canvas of this online whiteboard software, brainstorming meetings can be easily conducted in groups on the same whiteboard.
10. Vote on the Plan Before Closing the Meeting
Before the brainstorming session ends, team members should spend some time discussing the ideas that will be adopted. High-profile key ideas are listed through the shared Boardmix online whiteboard document, and the best solution can be voted on through online remote voting.
Conclusion
To sum up, different ideas collide with each other during the brainstorming process, and the use of these 10 advanced techniques can well exercise the creativity of the team, condense the team spirit, and provide the team with a way to inspire and develop. A platform for ideas, allowing teams to achieve higher work efficiency and solve problems they face.
During team brainstorming meetings, Boardmix is a comprehensive online whiteboard software that integrates multiple functions such as voice and video, online presentation, and multi-party collaboration. It supports the team to stimulate discussions more efficiently and can meet the needs of brainstorming from the beginning to the end. All officially completed work requirements, coupled with the rich templates built into the template center, greatly improve the efficiency of brainstorming. It is now free for individual users, click Boardmix to use it immediately!
