Brainwriting

What is the template about

Brainwriting Template (or the 6-3-5 Method) from the Design Thinking cycle

Brainwriting is a simple and effective method for generating high-quality innovative ideas. It encourages everyone to participate in decision-making (reducing the risk of dominant participants), helps teams think unconventionally, and simplifies the process of generating ideas through strict time constraints. As you perform brainwriting exercises, obvious ideas gradually give way to unconventional and fresh approaches and innovative solutions, ultimately opening up space for more bold out-of-the-box creativity. In addition, this mechanics allows for not giving up on approaches that may seem unpromising at first glance, but ensuring their further development, refinement, and finalization.

The brainwriting template is especially useful for collaboration between remote teams: its streams can be completed online in asynchronous mode, which helps to engage the creativity of all colleagues, regardless of their actual location.

Why to use our template

For this Design Thinking tool, the Møde team developed the most user-friendly UX-design possible, allowing participants to easily navigate in the frame, stick to their stream and not confuse it with the streams of their colleagues.

How you can benefit from it

Formulate important questions

• The question has a significant impact on the ability to form ideas. “How can we...” is a good wording with a unique and specific response coverage.

Hold Focus

• The question should be clear to all participants, this allows them to focus on generating ideas. Perhaps before using the method, you should discuss the problem statement in the group and ask the participants to reformulate it at the head of the template.

Show, don't tell!

• Depending on the question, you can sketch out ideas and make drawings rather than meticulously describing them.

Develop ideas

• Have participants take past ideas and build on them. Already written ideas or drawings are needed to inspire the participants again in each round, so the ideas develop further.

Select Ideas

• Intuitively or against criteria, evaluate the ideas written on each sticky note, and then select and highlight a number of ideas using dot voting. Alternatively, ideas can be mapped onto a matrix (for example, a 2 x 2 matrix) to illustrate the idea space.

How to use this template

1. Ask participants to write their names on any free sticky notes in the color they like. Within the frame, participants should work only on stickers of the selected color.

2. The participants should move horizontally to the next sticker of their color and in 1 minute formulate 1 original idea on how to make a gift for the beginning of autumn for themselves / their colleagues and relatives. This topic was chosen to illustrate the application of the method within the framework of the template — you can set any other topic for generating ideas, including those related to the current project / product / problem facing the company. Tip: For ease of navigation, participants can click on the arrow located in the upper right corner of the shapes in which they work.

3. Ask participants to move diagonally to the next sticker in their color and take 1 minute to improve or scale the idea on the left. Tip: For ease of navigation, participants can click on the arrow located in the upper right corner of the shapes in which they work.

4. Ask participants to move diagonally again to the next sticky note of their color and take 1 minute to improve or scale the idea on the left. Tip: For ease of navigation, participants can click on the arrow located in the upper right corner of the shapes in which they work.

5. Ask participants to move horizontally to the next sticker in their color and write their name on it so the facilitator can see that they are ready.