Virtual brainstorming: method and tips

To come up with and exchange ideas and start build collective intelligence, nothing beats a brainstorming session. While sticky notes and a white or black board are used for physical brainstorming meetings, digital online tools now allow us to extend brainstorming to virtual meetings. And, well, sometimes it’s even more effective!

Discover methods and tips for a successful online brainstorming session with Wooclap!

Definition of virtual brainstorming

Like its in-person version, virtual remote brainstorming is a collaborative work technique aimed at bringing out ideas or finding solutions to a problem. It starts with individual creativity, which is then stimulated and shared with the meeting group.

Digital tools have allowed us to overcome distances and create virtual brainstorming sessions where participants can come together online in order to share their ideas. Sticky notes are replaced by digital labels, and collective organizational work by drag and drop!

However, it can be problematic to recreate the exact same conditions online as in in-person team brainstorming!

Indeed, a Harvard Business Review article highlighted research that suggests that these are two very working methods. Besides, by transposing the exact same habits from in-person brainstorming sessions to virtual brainstorming sessions, we risk losing positives and keeping only the negatives. This means, we might struggle at maintaining the energy of participants and might lose effectiveness in driving true innovation.

Virtual brainstorming leaves more room for individual and free reflection, and adapts better to all kinds of personalities because it makes the anonymization of ideas possible, and is therefore more conducive to the emergence of truly new ideas.

Ready to innovate? We will explain just how with Wooclap!

Tools for virtual brainstorming

Thanks to digital and online tools, you can now easily set up a virtual brainstorming session, similar in design to an ideation workshop. This is the case with Wooclap, which has a special interactive online brainstorming tool. You can first use the Wooclap interactive question platform to start to create a slideshow, to display your brainstorming stimulus questions, such as “What are your ideas for the business project in the coming year?”

But Wooclap’s features take you much further than that:

• Create a “Word Cloud” question to offer the team the opportunity to add a word or two, which will be directly displayed on the next slide. The group can then start to discuss the answers together.
• Create a “Brainstorming” question that allows the team to brainstorm ideas and start to organize them into several categories. The participants can add the ideas directly to the category boxes.
• Or they can rearrange them by drag and drop between boxes, following discussion for example.

The brainstorming question also offers the possibility to add likes to validate the ideas of each participant. To do this, activate the “Likes on answers” feature in the right-hand column of the dashboard when you create your question.

Finally, you can add a countdown timer, in order to further stimulate the creativity of your virtual brainstorming participants by setting the constraint of a time limit. Activate this option if you want to set it up!

Steps to follow to set up an effective virtual brainstorming session

Once you have chosen the digital tools you are going to choose, you can create successful virtual brainstorming session by following these few simple steps.

1. Adequately prepare your brainstorming session in advance

Create and add your slides and design the presentation of the brainstorming stimuli (for example, with your Wooclap questions), and set a time for each stage of the virtual brainstorming session. You can also set up your brainstorming session in an asynchronous manner, to give all the necessary time for participants to come up with their best ideas, to then be discussed and exchanged.

To do this, send preparatory questions in advance, set a deadline, and then bring the participants together for an online sharing and discussion session. This solution saves time during the actual virtual meeting.

2. Allow for individual thinking and reflection in order to generate the best ideas

If you opt for live brainstorming, set aside a fair amount of time for individual reflection (around 15 minutes, depending on the topic you want to brainstorm). Participants can then add their ideas to the virtual whiteboard collaboration tool. Invite them to consider quality over quantity.

And why not anonymize the responses? This will avoid self-censorship, and give free rein to the best innovative ideas!

Meanwhile, as the organizer of the brainstorming session, you can remove all the duplicates or organize the ideas for better visibility.

3. Share the ideas and have them discussed by the participants

Display all the ideas (reorganized by you) using the collaboration tool. The participants will then have to evaluate them, and you can guide them in this task by asking them for a rating, for example, or a classification according to certain evaluation categories (the novelty of the idea, its feasibility, its speed of application, etc.).

On Wooclap, this can be done by allowing the participants to add likes to responses.

4. Decide on future actions

Have you now got a shortlist of great ideas? Well done! However, don’t stop there, for the virtual brainstorming to be a real success, you should decide on future actions to take at the end of the meeting. Schedule an upcoming meeting to arrange the implementation of the ideas or the development of the project, or set key work progress dates in your calendar.

Best practices: our final tips for a successful virtual brainstorming session

Use an icebreaker to start the meeting

For effective brainstorming, people must feel free to speak and express themselves, their ideas and their thinking. Therefore, it is important to establish a climate of trust and team work. And for this, an icebreaker is a great idea, especially in the case of virtual brainstorming!

Framing the brainstorming

Brainstorming should not just be mess of ideas going in all kinds of directions. Maintain a team focus on a specific topic or problem, and frame the brainstorming with the right questions to adequately guide the generation of ideas. This is precisely the purpose of Wooclap’s “Brainstorming” question. It suggests areas of reflection following a general question, in order to guide and focus the participants.

Choose synchronous or asynchronous mode

Choose in advance whether your virtual brainstorming will be done entirely live, in synchronous mode, or whether it can be prepared in advance by the participants, in asynchronous mode. This second option involves the sending of preparatory questions to your participants (e.g. “What is your feedback on this event?”, “What are your ideas for improving it?”), before the online brainstorming collaboration session.

The session will then allow the ideas to be brought together, opinions to be given and debated, and solutions to be developed and decided upon. Select Wooclap’s asynchronous mode to send the brainstorming questions to your participants in advance. They can then answer the questions whenever they want before the team brainstorming meeting.

Watch the time

An effective brainstorming session is one that is time-limited. After a certain amount of time, ideas will start to lose their quality and will become more and more disparate and contradictory. To keep discussions relevant and focused, be sure to set a time limit for each stage: from individual reflection through to the pooling of ideas, discussion, and final decision-making via a vote or poll.

Plan a schedule for all your brainstorming steps, and use Wooclap’s “Countdown” feature to help you keep to time.