Don’t talk during the ideation session and generate tons of ideas.
Do you struggle to speak up and share your ideas during ideation sessions?
In traditional brainstorms, the loudest ideas often receive attention, but this means potentially great ideas that don't surface are missed. Simply gathering people and conducting group dialog is an ineffective way to produce ideas.
One reason people hesitate to speak up is that they are aware their idea will be seen as theirs. Your ideas and your identity are always connected when sharing in front of people, and nobody wants to be seen as stupid. It's easy to feel hesitation to share completely openly and honestly, even if you have a crazy idea.
What if we detached personal identity from ideas and purely brought ideas to the table? In this way, we can avoid being influenced by who came up with the idea.
In our experiment with an anonymous ideation session, participants were able to contribute ideas without hesitation. It became much easier for them to share even stupid or crazy ideas. This method worked particularly well for people who are not used to speaking up in front of others. It gave them a sense of safety when coming up with ideas and putting them out there.
Here are some frameworks and tools for conducting anonymous ideation sessions:
Anonymous Mode in Collaboration Tools
With online collaboration tools such as Mural, Miro, Figjam or Google Slides, you can give access with anonymous guest editor mode.
Participants can access the shared document with guest edit access.
Choose "Anyone with the link" as an "Editor" when sharing Google Slides for guest access to anonymous ideation.
Anonymous ideation on Mural.co
Brain Writing Framework:
Brainwriting is a silent ideation framework where each individual writes their own ideas (typically three ideas). After a few minutes, each person passes their ideas to someone else who reads and adds more ideas.
Brainwriting Worksheets
Brainwriting template in Miro.
Brainwriting template on Google Slides
Use Post-Its in Physical Ideation Sessions
If you are conducting a session physically with participants, you can use the same color sticky notes (post-its) and hand them to a facilitator. The facilitator will then put them on the wall. In this way, people lose track of who generated which ideas.
Parallel Idea Generation
All participants can quietly generate ideas and respond to others' ideas simultaneously. This is a huge time saver and allows the team to generate many more ideas at once.
Next time you host an ideation session, experiment with these methods to make it more effective.
Takao Umehara
