Brainwriting Template

There are so many ways to gather ideas from your team and just as many ways to organize the ideas. All of the techniques have their own pros and cons, so it’s tough to say what the “best” one is for your team. What we can do is show you how these techniques work and let you try it for yourself, with a little help from EasyRetro of course.

Today, we’re going to look at brainwriting and explore some techniques to take your ideation sessions to the next level.

What is brainwriting?

Brainwriting isn’t too far away from a traditional brainstorming session. The aim is the same, the method is just a little different.

Rather than having your team yell out ideas and hope your scribe can keep up, brainwriting allows the team to write down their ideas on cards or online boards. These cards or boards can be given to individual team members, or passed around the group to enable some collaboration.

After a set amount of time (anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes), the meeting facilitator reads out the idea cards and the group can discuss which ideas will work for the next sprint.

You may think this is just a regular brainstorm with extra steps. However, offering the team a quieter session like this can encourage your more introverted team mates to put forward their ideas without the fear of being interrupted or shot down.

How to use brainwriting

A basic brainwriting exercise is one of the easiest ideation sessions to lead. With a little help from EasyRetro to create your brainwriting template you will need next to no time to prepare!

Step 1: Create columns for each team member to place their ideas onto.
Step 2: Explain the intention of the session and the kind of ideas you’re looking to generate. Set a timer and ask your team to write down any and all ideas they have on the topic at hand.
Step 3: Once time is up, everyone passes their ideas to the meeting facilitator.
Step 4: Now it’s time to discuss the ideas with everything up on the board for the whole team to see. You could also hold quick votes on ideas that won’t fit with the upcoming sprint.

If you prefer to run your ideation sessions with a little more structure, there are some more advanced ways of brainwriting that may be exactly what you’ve been searching for.

Advanced brainwriting 1: 6-3-5 Model

The 6-3-5 model adds some structure and collaboration to the brainwriting process.

The group will be limited to 6 team members who will each be tasked to write down 3 ideas in 5 minutes (hence the name). After 5 minutes, the cards get passed to another team member.

Rinse and repeat until all members have contributed to all cards.

Using this method, you can generate (assuming our math is correct!) 108 ideas in just 30 minutes. While 6 is the recommended team size, you could host the session with a higher or lower number, depending on your team size.

From there, it’s a case of removing any duplicated ideas and then discussing which ideas to move forward with. Consider a dot-voting session to pick the best ideas.

The key to a successful 6-3-5 session is ensuring that every participant is well versed in the project’s goal. This may mean you have to get selective about who you invite to the session to make sure all ideas are relevant and valuable.

Advanced brainwriting 2: Pool brainwriting

Sometimes referred to as “constrained brainwriting”, this method ditches the structure and amps up the collaboration to seek out specific ideas based on a predetermined focus.

The facilitator will present specific problems that need solving on a series of pre-prepared idea boards. Participants are free to choose any problem to work on during the session. If they select a board to work on, they add their ideas and then replace it into the “pool” and take another.

This works best if you have slightly more problems than participants, so there is always a board free for someone to pick up and work on. The idea behind this approach is that it focuses your team on relevant problems, but allows a free flow of ideas to help solve each one.

More ideas = better final products

As we mentioned earlier, there is no “best” technique to use during ideation sessions. However, now you have the information to help you decide which could work best for your team. Each method has its pros and cons but brainwriting sessions could be the difference between you solving your biggest problems today rather than next week or next month.

It’s also worth remembering that these sessions can double as team building and confidence building exercises. Choosing a silent ideation session encourages your quieter team members to put forward their ideas rather than worrying about trying to compete with the more outgoing personalities.

Offering the entire team a chance to voice their ideas will shine a light on your most promising team members who aren’t confident enough to stand up and become the center of attention. Not only will you be getting great ideas to move forward with, that person will feel validated, included and more confident.

Creating a brainwriting template in EasyRetro

No matter which method works for you, it’s always handy to have a template ready for your team to work with, as not all of them will be familiar with the brainwriting process. Luckily for you, easy to use templates are what we do best at EasyRetro

Creating a brainwriting template with EasyRetro takes mere seconds, thanks to our effortless drag and drop functionality. You can even use one of our pre-made templates and customize them with just a few clicks.

All you need to do is pick the brainwriting method you want to try and within minutes you’ll have a clean template that can be easily shared to the team and reused time and time again.