Brainwriting Template
Add quiet ideation to your brainstorm to generate and improve upon ideas.
About the Brainwriting Template
What is brainwriting?
Instead of asking participants to yell out ideas during your brainstorm, the brainwriting technique invites them to write down ideas. After a few minutes, each person passes their ideas to someone else who reads and adds to them. Repeat the process for 10-15 minutes, then read out all the ideas to the group and discuss.
When to use brainwriting
In traditional brainstorms, often the loudest ideas win. Brainwriting is an exercise that not only helps introverted people be heard, but it allows you to think of more ideas than you would if you were just shouting out. Plus, quiet ideation encourages more original ideas by every individual — not just the loud few.
Start using the Brainwriting Template
Leading a brainwriting brainstorm is easy. Miro’s the perfect online brainstorming tool to create and share ideas virtually. Get started by opening the Brainwriting Template.
Step 1: Add your participants’ names to a column of sticky notes and invite them to the board.
Step 2: Introduce the problem, and use the Timer to set a 5 minute limit on the first round of brainwriting.
Step 3: When the Timer dings, tell participants to move their ideas to the person on the right. Then start the timer again, and ask participants to add stickies below the ideas that add to or improve upon the ideas.
Step 4: Do this for a few more rounds, then facilitate a discussion with the team on all the ideas you come up with. You can even vote on ideas or group them to see which are the most feasible.
Get started with this template right now. It’s free
Mind Map
We see you, visual learners. You grasp concepts and understand data easier when they're presented in well-organized, memorable graphics. Mind mapping is perfect for you. This powerful brainstorming tool presents concepts or ideas as a tree — with the central subject as the trunk and your many ideas and subtopics as the branches. This template is a fast, effective way for you to start mind mapping, which can help you and your team become more creative, remember more, and solve problems more effectively.
Customer Problem Statement
A company of any size or kind needs to be able to make its case—by clearly articulating how its product will meet customers’ needs. A customer problem statement will help make that case a compelling one. How? You’ll dive into your customers’ thoughts and feelings, which ups your odds of creating something they will find valuable. And a problem statement does more than deliver big for your customers—it helps your teams align around a common, clearly defined goal, and feel invested in achieving it.
Reverse Brainstorming
Reverse brainstorming is a technique that prompts a group to think of problems, rather than solutions. Because we naturally think of problems, it’s a great way to get a group to anticipate problems that may occur during a project. To engage in reverse brainstorming, start by identifying the problem, and then think of things that might exacerbate it. Ask your team to generate ideas around ways in which the problem could get worse. Reverse the problems into solutions again, and then evaluate your ideas.
Meeting Organizer
When it comes to ideas generated during a meeting, you want quantity AND quality. So why choose? Our meeting organizer template will maximize your meeting’s chances of yielding lots of great ideas. It will give you a simple, efficient way to design any activity (including meetings and daily planning) and make sure remote teammates know just what the meeting aims to accomplish. And you can give your meeting organizer power by connecting Miro to your favorite apps and services: Atlassian’s JIRA, Google Drive, Slack, Trello, DropBox and OneDrive.
How Now Wow Matrix
There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm — but some are more original and easier to implement. The How Now Wow matrix is a tool that helps you identify and organize those great ideas, as well as reinvigorates your team to think creatively and take risks (a taller order as you scale). Grab this template to create your own matrix, then rank the ideas you generated in a brainstorm as “How” (difficult to implement), “Now” (easy to implement), or “Wow” (both original and easy to implement).
SIPOC
A SIPOC diagram maps a process at a high level by identifying the potential gaps between suppliers and input specifications and between customers and output specifications, and thereby defines the scope of process improvement activities. The acronym SIPOC stands for Suppliers (sources), Input, Process, Output, and Customers. SIPOC identifies feedback and feed-forward loops between customers, suppliers, and the processes, and jump-starts the team to think in terms of cause and effect. Use this visual tool to document the working process from beginning to end.