Where Does Brainstorming Fit in a Workflow Diagram?
Brainstorming has often been ignored when mapping out a workflow, or workflow diagram, and this is detrimental to the sequence of tasks and results many businesses and teams strive for. It’s an aspect that is often overlooked — and in most cases — isn’t fully realized or considered a step in a team meeting.
The truth is that using brainstorming techniques should be one of the most important components in your team’s workflow.
In order to learn why brainstorming is crucial to the workflow processes we must first define what it is.
Broken down in simplest terms, brainstorming is a process where you try to generate as many different ideas as you can about a topic or project. However, brainstorming is more than just thinking of as many ideas as you can in your head.
Your team needs to make sure those ideas are written out or placed on a chart. The purpose of brainstorming isn’t just to create a list of ideas, but to take those ideas and analyze them to better understand how they fit together as a whole, or to focus in on specific groups of ideas. It can be beneficial to have a visual aid when brainstorming and mapping out a project. This is traditionally called a workflow diagram.
What is a workflow diagram and what’s its purpose?
Originating in the manufacturing industry in the 1900s, workflow diagrams are now used by a variety of industries — from government to finance to commerce — and are easier than ever to create using available technologies.
Using standardized symbols, shapes, and colors, a workflow diagram shows step-by-step how your team’s work is completed from start to finish. It also shows who is responsible for work at what point in the process.
Workflow diagrams are also useful to help employees understand their roles, and the order in which work is completed. This creates more unity within different departments.
A workflow diagram is needed when a project has multiple roles and can be useful to plan ahead. Workflow diagrams are also useful for a manager or team leader to track metrics for a process, eliminate inefficiency, or automate a manual process.
A workflow should be detailed, but not too detailed. It’s important to define the scope of your workflow diagram. The scope should be large enough to give you and your team new insights, but not so big that your diagram becomes too complicated to understand.
The best thing to do is start at the beginning and the end results first. Then add in the path you and your team need to follow in order to reach a just conclusion.
There are many different types of workflows, each with their own unique diagram, but there are three that stand out to help visualize workflow and to better engage in project strategies.
A typical flowchart is the most common form of workflow. Flowcharts use common shapes and don't contain much writing or delegation on specific tasks. They usually follow a straight line.
The process flowchart is slightly more complex, generally used in manufacturing, administrative or service processes — like payroll — but can be useful for other high-level processes as well. A benefit of a process flowchart is that you are not limited to a single department or function. You can gain a much higher-level overview of a business process across the organization.
Finally, we have Swim Lane Diagrams. These take the workflow techniques a bit further, splitting up tasks for different departments and outlining when collaboration is needed during the project. Swimlane diagrams are excellent for quality management, as you can see at-a-glance who is responsible for a task at any stage in a process much more simply than with a typical workflow chart.
Does brainstorming only fit at the beginning of a workflow diagram?
You may think brainstorming can only fit in during the beginning of a workflow diagrams creation, but this is not the case.
Brainstorming needs to be incorporated at various steps and levels of the workflow. This helps evaluate, troubleshoot, and optimize ideas during any stage of the project and helps mold and create the best end result throughout the entire project.
Simply, brainstorming needs to be treated as an ongoing cycle.
How to do your best brainstorming
One advantage of remote work is that it is now easier to hear from a broader group of peers and employees around the world. It’s important to not just start with a list of people you want for your brainstorming sessions, but identify the roles of expertise you want.
“Ask your colleagues for recommendations of people you might not know who have relevant expertise. This will help you ensure that the group you bring together is more diverse, bringing a range of different backgrounds and perspectives to the problem-solving task,” says Art Markham for Harvard Business Review.
Always look for ways to promote collaboration during your brainstorming sessions and make sure they get creative and abstract. There’s lots of research showing that the more distant you are from something in time, space, or socially, the more abstractly you think about it. “In a remote working environment, this means that you are often physically distant from the site of the problems you’re trying to solve, and you, therefore, think about them more abstractly,” says Harvard Business Review.
In conclusion, while many features of modern business processes and workflows have evolved over the years, brainstorming has not. Businesses need to reintegrate brainstorming into the conversation, utilizing the right type of workflow for a specific project. This will be beneficial and can save time and efficiency problems.
Stormboard has multiple templates that can help your remote or hybrid teams create and share workflows. Explore our template gallery here and learn about our 30-day FREE trial here.
About the Author
Stephan Boissonneault is a freelance writer, editor, and photographer. His work has been seen in publications such as Avenue, Vue Weekly, Edmonton Journal, Disruption, Now Toronto, etc. He also plays music every now and then.