Brainstorming Blues? Try Brainwriting
Photo by Brands&People on Unsplash"Let's have a brainstorm!"
Even with the underlying excitement of everyone getting in a room and the collective wisdom creating something magical, why does it rarely work out? Does that leave you frustrated as a business leader? Well, you're not alone. Studies show that brainstorming as a group can be inefficient and also an impediment to problem-solving. Wait, what?
Think about it this way. As we learn more and more about neurodiversity in the workplace (individual differences in brain functioning regarded as normal variations within the human population), we understand that people think, learn, and process information differently. Not everyone thrives in a traditional brainstorm format, which may take some of the best ideas off the table before it even begins.
Social constructs and behavioral characteristics such as introversion, extroversion, groupthink, fear of criticism, do-nothing-ism can all impact idea output. Sometimes just the pure chaos of brainstorming limits natural idea generation.
There are a lot of alternatives, but a simple one that I love is "brainwriting." There are a few different flavors of brainwriting, but here is a checklist of my favorite approach.
Identify the problem or challenge (sometimes more complicated than it sounds).
Ask everyone to put their ideas on post-its. That will force everyone not to overexplain and move from one idea to the other.
Ask everyone to put their favorite ideas on a collaborative whiteboard. If you're doing this virtually, I recommend Miro.
Each participant "demos" or explains their idea in 30 seconds or less. This process helps mitigate participants from overselling and winning people with a bad idea but a better presentation.
Participants then vote ideas up or down and collaboratively generate a winning idea or a combination of winning ideas to explore.
You can streamline further by having a nominated "decider" make the final decision.
At this point, determine whether you are ready to proceed or if another session of peeling the onion back farther will get you to a conclusion.
Surprisingly, I've found this process will take the same amount of time or less than a group brainstorm and bring everyone's ideas to the surface.