Brainstorming is an essential component of collaboration and innovation within a team. However, organizing, analyzing and prioritizing the ideas generated during brainstorming sessions can take time. This is where technology and data come in.
On the surface, it may seem that data and collaboration don’t belong together. After all, collaboration is about connecting people to achieve a common goal and data is about removing people from processes to be more efficient.
But brainstorming as a team is really just a practice in data collection. Using technology isn’t intended to replace rich discussion. Quite the opposite actually—technology bolsters collaboration by removing mundane activities and freeing up time for more connection, deeper thinking, and collective problem-solving.
To make brainstorming sessions more effective, teams can use online whiteboards like Miro. These tools enable remote team members to collaborate and add their ideas before, during, and after the session. Online whiteboards also provide a variety of templates and features to help organize and visualize ideas.
An online brainstorming tool like Miro, for example, provides you with templates that will take you from ideas to implementation. Add shapes, text, and sticky notes. Keep your teams literally on the same page, or board, even if you can’t all be in the same room at the same time. For a simpler approach, you can also open a document on a shared service such as Sharepoint or Google Docs and allow your team to make edits and additions in real time.
Tools like this are great because they allow everyone to add their own ideas before, during and after the session. So your quieter team members can provide input in a comfortable setting.
After a brainstorming session, it can be time-consuming to sift through and make sense of the many ideas generated. To address this issue, teams can use automation tools to automatically categorize and sort ideas based on common themes. These themes and processes can then be organized or fed into software options to create mind maps, word clouds or other helpful graphics to showcase your teams’ priorities, thought processes and collaborative ideas.
Collaborative AI is also a helpful feature that can supercharge brainstorming sessions by generating and summarizing ideas, helping to name and iterate common themes, and providing a list of actionable steps.
Collaborative AI supercharges your brainstorming sessions by generating more ideas and automatically capturing the big picture by sorting and summarizing those ideas. In seconds, Collaborative AI will help you name and iterate common themes in your ideas, then provide a list of action items to easily take the next steps.
You can never have too many good ideas, which is why you can never have enough tools to help you generate, organize and capture your brainstorming. The best part about these options is they’ll provide you with a host of different ways to supplement your thinking and expand your horizons.