Exploring the benefits of brainwriting - Miro Tutorial

- [Instructor] When you think of brainstorming, you might think of people in a meeting where you raise your hand and you give an idea, and they write it on a board. Or you're at a board and you have a sticky note, and you need to stick it on the board or something like that. Or you share a piece of paper and you're all writing ideas down. There are a lot of ways to think of brainstorming. This is one simple example. Now, you don't have to have a file open right now. Just sit back for a second. If we had a series of questions, we needed answers, for instance, or ideas for some sort of problem we have, people might have a sticky. And in here they can option drag or alt drag and put an idea, so I can say this is like idea number one, right? And, you know, so-and-so could go over here and do the same thing. Like this is my idea number one, Now, the thing is, we're labeling this person with this color and sometimes this can get a little overwhelming because as you're writing your ideas, you're starting to look at other people's... This is human nature. You're starting to look at other people's ideas. And you're like, "Are mine as good?" And you start thinking it through and you're like, "Wait a minute. They just talked about this. Maybe I should recommend that too or suggest that as well." Somebody starts to put a lot of ideas out there and you're like, "Wow, Brian's really killing it. So I better pick up my game here and start writing some things." And you feel social pressure. Anyway, there's a lot of ways you can work with brainstorming. We do this, I do this a lot. Now, brainwriting, which you can see a template here as an example, is a little different. Brainwriting means that everybody gets their chance to write down ideas. When you write down ideas within a certain time limit, maybe like five minutes, you then pass those ideas to someone else. They build on them or write new ideas based on what they read from your ideas. I don't know if that makes sense. There's actually a method developed called the 6-3-5 Brainwriting Method. And this just means you have six people. They write down three ideas in five minutes. Then you take their sheet of paper, their sticky notes or whatever you got and you give it to the next person in line, and they build off of those. You do that every five minutes. And pretty soon, if you have six people, you're going to have a ton of ideas really quickly. Now there may be a lot of overlap or ideas that might not work or whatever, but the idea here, literally, is that we get a bunch of ideas down on paper that we can then go through as a group or somebody lead the discussion and weed out what we don't want. So let's take a quick look at an example here. This is six participants, which you notice that their names aren't here. I'm not trying to name the people. We're just trying to get people to associate with a color. And pretty soon you forget who's with what color. And that's a good thing, because then you don't have social pressure. You just start thinking about the ideas themselves. So let's say that we're talking about marketing ideas for our product. We need to brainstorm about how to do this. So participant one says, "You know, we need to do more social media content," or something like that. Person two here says, "You know, we need to have somebody, you know, stand on a corner with a sign." That kind of thing. Right? I don't know. Anyway, so after five minutes, everybody comes up with an idea, you can see here. Now this is a single idea. You can stretch this out to be three different ideas. It gets a little crazy if you've got stickies that way. You can also write three ideas on here. You can say social media content, stand on a corner with a sign, (chuckles) that kind of thing, so you're coming up with the same idea, right? So you can actually make it so that there's like a bullet. You type in an option eight, that kind of thing. Pick a bullet. If you want to do one idea, you want to do three ideas, it's up to you. You decide the rules when you're doing this. Now after five minutes, and don't forget we actually have a timer we can set here. So five minutes, we stop. The person that's yellow, for instance, will switch over to the right. The person that's purple will go over to yellow. You can see right here. Purple. So the next person in line does their ideas. You start the timer again and then say, okay, the purple person says, "You know what? Stand on the corner with a sign. Interesting." They create an idea that actually builds off of that. Like have sandwich boards instead. Sandwich boards, and I don't know how many of you know what those are, on a street corner or on a corner. Those are the boards that are kind of an upside down V or an A or something like that, that have a sign on them, for instance, so I'm looking at this right here. And as the next person, I'm starting to build off or come up with new ideas. After five minutes, we go on, we go on and we go on. We keep going. You can see that it goes on for a little while here, and everybody answers everyone else. So you're going to see yellow started this one. Purple went next, the dark pink here or red went next. Pink, orange, yellow. So that's kind of how it works. This is a fast way to generate a bunch of ideas and everyone can be heard. Some people are anxious. You know, they don't want to have their name associated with something, especially if they're having, you know, they're not coming up with a lot of ideas for that moment. You can keep a copy of what was said, refer to it months down the road. It's easy and efficient to capture these input from these users, and it's a way to build teams. It's a way to build team community. There are a lot of reasons to use brainstorming in general and brainwriting specifically. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to set up a brainwriting board.