Structured Brainstorming
What:
Gather insights from stakeholders, consider a range of options, and then focus your team on the best solution.
Who:
A brainstorming process should involve everyone who has an interest in the problem, including those who will be involved in the implementation and anyone affected by it.
Where:
These rapid discussions can take place in-person or on a video-conferencing platform. Distributed teams frequently use shared documents to brainstorm asynchronously.
What: Gather insights from stakeholders, consider a range of options, and then focus your team on the best solution.
Who: A brainstorming process should involve everyone who has an interest in the problem, including those who will be involved in the implementation and anyone affected by it.
Where: These rapid discussions can take place in-person or on a video-conferencing platform. Distributed teams frequently use shared documents to brainstorm asynchronously.
Best Practices:
Best Practices:
Align your team to a common goal.
Establish a clear sense of the problem to be solved, centered around a single topic or metric.
Avoid conflicting objectives that slow your progress and reduce your ability to produce quality ideas.
Capture ideas in a document or on a canvas so they don't get lost.
Example: Use a premortem exercise to define a goal, identify potential pitfalls, and create a mitigation plan to avoid them.
Share a short list of open-ended questions.
Give the group ten minutes to generate responses to these questions.
Encourage them to aim for quantity and to avoid filtering their responses.
Example: Use "how might we?" questions to frame the challenge you're trying to solve in a way that will help you spark new ideas.
Review the result.
Give everyone on your team the opportunity to speak up and be heard.
Invite disagreement during the discussion to see where opinions diverge.
Example: Use a structured agenda for your review session to ensure you ask the right questions and gather enough feedback.
Create constraints.
Don’t devote more than two or three days to brainstorming.
Generate new ideas quickly: avoid getting bogged down in endless conversations that prevent you from moving forward.
Example: Use guided questions to train your team to think rigorously and systematically without getting stuck.
Success is:
You know you've completed a successful brainstorming process when you’ve included a diverse range of stakeholders, considered a wide range of possible solutions, and winnowed the list down to one best option.
Templates:
Making it happen:
Here's how Almanac helps you brainstorm ideas more effectively.
Success is: You know you've completed a successful brainstorming process when you’ve included a diverse range of stakeholders, considered a wide range of possible solutions, and winnowed the list down to one best option.
Making it happen: Here's how Almanac helps you brainstorm ideas more effectively.
Real-time Collaboration
Collaborate with confidence knowing you will always have the latest changes from your team.
Voting
Streamline feedback and brainstorming with in-document voting. No more "+1s" needed.
Timer
Keep your brainstorming sessions, standups, retros, and team meetings on track with our in-doc timer.
Rich text comments
Give clear and actionable feedback in your comments with the ability to format text and create lists.
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