Brainwriting: The Team Hack To Generating Better Ideas
Brainstorming has long been held as the best way to get ideas from teams for decades, but what if we are wrong? Can we take the successful aspects of collaboration and create a better environment for quality concepts? Come learn about brainwriting and get more from your team today!
Description:
If you work in an office, you have probably participated in a brainstorming session or two (or 12). Invented in the 1940s by an advertising executive, the purpose was to solicit a large amount of ideas in a short period of time. By putting a collective of creative people in the same room, better concepts should come. Sounds very agile.
However, science has shown several times that brainstorming not the best way to generate ideas. It’s cumbersome due to all of the interdependent activities happening at once. When spending time generating ideas as a group, you often spend more time thinking of others ideas than your own.
Fortunately, a relatively unknown technique is starting to gain popularity called brainwriting. Incorporating it into your team events can produce more diverse ideas and provide a friendlier environment for collaboration. In this session, we will workshop them and leave the audience with all of the tools to bring the technique back to their offices.
Outline/Structure of the Workshop
- Intro
- Ideas are the key to innovation
- History of brainstorming
- What is brainwriting?
- Putting it into practice
- Wrap up
Learning Outcome
The fallacy of brainstorming
What makes an idea diverse
A walkthrough of using brainwriting in Agile events
Target Audience
Anyone who leads ideation sessions.
Video
Links
chrismurman.com
What Makes It Compelling:
I was skeptical when I first read an article on the technique, mainly because I had always believed brainstorming produced quality ideas. As a “stickies and sharpies” type of coach, I’d seen so many teams collectively throw out ideas during planning and retrospective sessions. But in the ensuing weeks, I started seeing where the article was on point in terms of producing quality ideas.
After contrasting the ideas generated after using brainwriting for a few weeks, my mind was changed forever. Even better was the events themselves didn’t seem that different to teams.
