Your Guide to Action Brainstorming Remotely

At Stormboard, we are big believers in creativity and collaboration through brainstorming. It is a multi-faceted tool that can be utilized by an individual or a team to solve a myriad of problems. 

Today we are going to teach you how to apply a specific kind of brainstorming — Action Brainstorming. 

But, before we dive into the aspects of this process, we wanted to give you some tips on how to brainstorm remotely, as we know a lot of teams have moved to working from home (#WFH). 

How to brainstorm remotely with your team

Brainstorming sessions are done for one main reason — to generate ideas. And remote brainstorming sessions should have the same goal. 

All participants should feel the freedom to throw out any ideas they have, even if they seem too simple, too complex, or too odd because they just might work. If not, it’s great to have a backlog of ideas for future use.

1. Use a digital whiteboard or workspace
   In order to capture all of the ideas that are coming from your remote team members, you need everyone to be able to contribute no matter where they are located. 
   Having a digital workspace that is accessible to everyone (like Stormboard!) will allow all of your colleagues to contribute to the conversation, in their own words, remotely. 

2. Diversify your session
   When your team is brainstorming, make sure everyone’s opinion is heard.
   If you don’t have much diversity of experience on your team, reach out to people who bring in some new perspective. This could be customers, employees on different teams, or people you reach out to on social media.

3. Don’t rush the brainstorming process
   Give your team an appropriate amount of time in order to let ideas grow and flourish. Be flexible with your deadlines. 
   It is better to take the time and get ideas right rather than rushing and using the first thing that comes to mind. Having a digital workspace that your colleagues can come back to whenever inspiration strikes is a great way to facilitate this process. 

4. Use more visuals
   Writing down ideas in a notebook or jotting things on a whiteboard is fine, but it is mediocre when it comes to creativity. While writing down ideas is good, using visual components like video, photos, and drawings are a great way to stimulate more idea generation. 
   With Stormboard, you can easily share your ideas visually using whiteboard sticky notes, photo sticky notes, and sticky notes integrated with YouTube. 

5. Do some pre-planning  
   Plan ahead of time to make sure your entire team is prepped for the brainstorming session.
   This can be done by sending out material to your team ahead of time with the questions and topics of discussion through email or messenger, or adding them to Stormboard so that the team can access before, during, and after the brainstorming session.

What is Action Brainstorming? 

Most businesses are usually thinking about what more they could be doing to increase productivity and their bottom line — but this means more work and more responsibility. Action Brainstorming helps companies to meet the same end result — increased productivity and profitability — with the opposite actions. 

Action Brainstorming is ideal for examining which behaviors and actions are not helping you to serve your clients, align with company values, and accomplish your goals. 

How to hold an effective Action Brainstorming session 

Our Action Brainstorming Template will take you through the necessary steps to complete your Brainstorming session, but we recommend you brush up on the following:

• Review your company values
  You need to make sure that all of the tasks and work that is being done aligns with to core values of your company. 

• Look at your company’s year-end business goals
  What are the ultimate goals that you are trying to reach by the end of the year? Is the work that you are doing leading you there? 

• Identify the processes your company takes to serve your clients
  What steps are taken to ensure that your clients or customers are happy? Is what you are doing working? 

• Review any additional company processes and daily workflows
  Think about all of the things that happen in your team’s day-to-day work. Are there multiple daily, weekly, or monthly meetings? 

Action Brainstorming with Stormboard

Use this template for a high-level look at your company processes, as an in-depth examination of what isn’t working for a department, or to get yourself out of a rut and get moving.

The five labeled columns will help you identify what actions you need to Stop, what you need to Minimize or do less of, what needs to Keep Going, what you know you should be Doing More of, and what you need to Start doing in order to move your priorities forward.

The Action Brainstorming Template sections

1. Stop

   This section is where you and your team will decide what you need to stop doing within your work process. 
   You’ll want to stop doing anything that is holding you back, isn’t working anymore, or that needs to be put on hold for a while. For example, you may need to pause the development of a new product until you can get user feedback.

2. Minimize

   The Minimize section is where you list all the things you don’t want to get rid of completely from your work process, but that you want to cut back on. 
   If you feel that you are doing too much of something, include it in this section so you know to lessen it. For example, you may want to cut back on daily meetings and only hold meetings once a week, or have the marketing team cut back on re-tweeting instead of posting original Tweets.

3. Keep Going 

   Use this section to write down everything that is working well and that your team should continue doing. 
   If something works, don’t change it! For example, paid Facebook Ads are working very well to drive business, so continue using them.

4. Do More 
   This section is where you determine what you want to be doing even more of. 
   If a process you have created is working well, you may want to add to it or implement it in other parts of your team. For example, if your current product is selling well, you may want to add new features to it to continue its momentum.

5. Start

   This section is where you will decide what to start working on next. 
   These are things that aren’t yet in your work process — they might be sitting in a backlog — but you would like to add them in to take your project to the next level. For example, it might be time to launch that new marketing campaign!

This template is a great way to review the work process or processes that you are using for your work. Once your team examines their work process, moving forward with plans, projects, and behaviors will become easier.

Setting priorities after your brainstorming session 

When your team uses Stormboard, you don’t need to rely on old-fashioned tactics to prioritize ideas.

Here are the ways Stormboard improves prioritization:

Voting on Ideas

Every single sticky note in Stormboard — no matter the type —can be voted on. This feature makes it simple to gather quick, anonymous feedback from your team.

Commenting on Ideas

Not only can you vote on sticky notes, but you can also comment on them. This is a perfect way to let someone know what you think of their idea. For example, if you love an idea your co-worker came up with, leave a comment with your input so they can get instant feedback.

Assigning Tasks

After voting on content, and setting priorities, you can assign individual sticky notes to your team members as tasks.

This ensures that everyone knows what they are responsible for at the end of a meeting and gives the facilitator a place to check in on deadlines and a task’s progress.

Learn more about Voting, Commenting, and Assigning in our blog post: How to Prioritize Content After a Meeting Using Stormboard

Are you ready to transform your remote brainstorming sessions with Stormboard? 

Stormboard is offering 30-day FREE trials to Enterprise and Business Teams that are looking for remote solutions. Sign-up and learn more about the features that we offer here.

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