Brainwriting is a technique used in the corporate sector to generate ideas and potential plans. Conducting a brainwriting session is an interesting thing to witness because of how it functions uniquely compared to brainstorming. In order to effectively conduct a brainwriting session, however, you need to understand the original brainwriting example.
Brainwriting sessions can let participants explore multiple variants of thought processes and how each member is gifted with unique thinking capacities. For people eager to know a simple process to conduct a brainwriting session, we have listed the steps to complete a simple yet impactful brainwriting example.
Add Participants
To conduct a brainwriting session, you must first write down the names of your participants and recruit them for this activity. Collaboration is the very core of brainwriting, and without it, it wouldn’t exist.
Make sure to have diversity in your group, and you don’t add many like-minded people to your session. Given that this exercise is focused on integrating multiple perspectives into idea generation, it’s important these perspectives are diverse.
State a Theme or a Specific Problem
To conduct such a session, you need to have a focused idea or problem that you want your participants to use for ideation. Choosing a main problem or theme is the first step to conducting a brainwriting session.
This step is significant because it is an initial point or opening towards a healthy and positive activity. Everyone must work from the same set of shared opinions to ensure that you’re building a well-informed list of ideas.
Explain the Rules
Before beginning, it’s essential not to assume that everyone already knows the rules of the activity. As a moderator, it is your responsibility to address the rule before the beginning of the activity, or else the process will be entirely corrupted.
The important rules to follow in brainwriting are that nobody talks or exchanges ideas during the session, and nobody can repeat ideas or contributions. This ensures that everything created is unique, self-informed, and isn’t repetitive.
Writing your Ideas
It must be clear that participants are requested to state their opinions by writing them silently in brainwriting. This step includes all the participants writing down their critical ideas and plans related to a problem.
Participants will write their desired questions and then pass down their hidden answers to other participants to evaluate their ideas. Depending on how big your session is, this should take anywhere from 5-20 minutes.
During this time, people will write their initial ideas and comment on the ideas of others one at a time. This will go for as many rounds as there are people and will end after everyone finishes.
Sharing of ideas
In the final step, participants review and comment on all the other ideas on the board. This step is where collaboration opens up with the entire team.
During this process, people will share their initial vision behind the first idea they create and their thought on its direction. At this point, others can comment and share their thoughts while discussing how this idea could impact their goals. At the end of the session, your team should develop a variety of different well-informed solutions.
Conclusion
To conduct brainwriting in your workplace, make sure to address your team members briefly about the activity and how it can elevate their thinking process and generate ideas. If you liked this article, make sure you think about some of our other brainwriting example content.
