Team brainstorming: tools, tips, and 6 effective techniques to get the ideas flowing!

Starting from a central topic (such as “our brand”) or problem, team members are invited to note down related ideas, and place them in bubbles around this central topic or problem. Each idea is then related to and surrounded by other ideas (such as “our history” → “our beginnings” / “our development”). The final result will be a mind map, which can be further refined to keep and emphasize the very best ideas or solutions.

This brainstorming technique stimulates thinking by creating a visual path of the process, and works extremely well with visual thinking people and team members.

The technique requires a very large piece of paper, whiteboard or an effective virtual tool, and can be difficult to set up in a large group, or remotely.

Rapid ideation is a brainstorming method that aims to generate as many ideas as possible in a given time. For example, following a question (such as “How could we make more sales?”), participants will have 8 minutes or so, and must generate one idea every minute for that entire time. The displayed timer forces them to move on to the generation of the next idea just as soon as each minute is up.

This technique stimulates creativity by pushing people to be creative in the allotted time, and will prevent the stagnation of ideas.

The speed of the activity can block some people from contributing.

Starbursting is a technique that see team members invited to, first of all, generate 6 questions around a certain topic, represented by the points of a star, with each point asking a question that will begin with: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. Team members must then answer each question within a set time, before discussing the best answers all together.

This brainstorming method stimulates team work by encouraging the team members to search for a joint solution.

The method works best for a second phase of the process of brainstorming, with some ideas already having been generated (e.g. after thinking about a project or product, to explore the conditions for its design and realization).

With this brainstorming technique, each of the team members has a set time to generate 1 to 3 ideas related to the topic in question, and will have to write them down on a sheet of paper or using a digital tool. Then, that person will pass the paper or ideas to his or her neighbor, who must generate some new ideas in turn. The process continues until each sheet is full with the ideas of everyone in the team. The group will then discuss all of the generated ideas or solutions.

This brainstorming method is great for shy people, because it allows them to be inspired by the ideas of others while thinking up new ones, and it avoids the pitfall of collecting ideas only from the loudest team members.

The process will take quite a bit of time for a large group, and will generate a lot of ideas that will take a long time to share and analyze in the discussion phase.

The Round Robin is a variation of the brainwriting method, but is performed orally instead. Each person contributes an idea that the others will be invited to respond and add something to, such as by saying “Yes, and...”. The goal of this technique is to explore and consolidate each idea with the additions of the other group participants. Once the round of discussion on that particular idea has come to an end, the group will move on to another member of the team, and therefore to another idea.

This brainstorming method favors the participation of everyone in the group, and avoids people talking over each other, as everyone gets time to speak and contribute an idea.

This method is difficult to manage in a large group, so large groups should be split up into smaller sub-groups.

A SWOT Analysis invites participants to consider the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats inherent to a project or topic. Everyone in the group is invited to explore, in writing or orally, what they think about each topic, for example, a product launch. This makes it possible to consider the benefits and risks of a certain action, and to generate solutions and mitigations of the risks.

It focuses the brainstorming on a certain action, and therefore helps in decision-making.

This method focuses more on concrete actions, rather than creative ideas.