8 group brainstorming techniques for distributed teams and how to approach them

When you think of effective brainstorming⁠(opens in a new tab or window), what comes to mind? Maybe a colorful Post-It? Or a giant whiteboard on the wall surrounded by people looking inquisitively at the words and visuals in front of them?

Perhaps that’s just the stock image that pops up when we think “brainstorming.” The truth is that problem-solving and generating creative ideas are much more complex than that, especially in our digital age.

As a team leader at a remote company, you’re no stranger to digital collaboration⁠(opens in a new tab or window), management, and teamwork. When it comes to brainstorming techniques, there are a number of methods that work especially well for remote teams. Whether you work asynchronously or in real time, these brainstorming techniques will help your distributed team develop new and better ideas.

The nature of remote work allows teams to overcome some of the brainstorming challenges that are more common in person, like groupthink, peer pressure, or fear of public speaking.

Unlike in-person, remote work can offer more time to think and digest information. It can also control what brainstorming conversations you are privy to. There are typically no opportunities to accidentally overhear or see other people’s ideas. This leaves room to think of your own ideas and not be swayed by others.

Here are four general approaches to remote brainstorming:

• Asynchronous stepladder approach: Each team member contributes an idea without seeing other people’s ideas first. This helps you avoid reflexively using the first idea.
• Asynchronous collaboration with deadlines: Each team member passes off their idea to the next person to build on it within a specific time frame and order. This brainstorming technique is referred to as collaborative brainwriting.
• Asynchronous collaboration without deadlines: Each team member has the ability to add ideas at any time and without any specific order. This brainstorming technique is referred to as online brainstorming or brain netting.
• Real-time virtual collaboration: Whether you meet via Zoom, a conference call, or another video conferencing platform, this group brainstorming session happens in real time with everyone present. There are two types of brainstorming techniques that can work virtually: round-robin brainstorming (in a video meeting) or charrette (breaking up into smaller groups within a larger video meeting).

Once you’ve selected the approach that works best for your team, you can then select the visual collaboration method that will guide your team through the brainstorming process⁠(opens in a new tab or window).

Visual collaboration tools⁠(opens in a new tab or window) improve critical-thinking skills by taking complex or varied ideas and making them easier to understand and build on. If you don’t already, use brainstorming tools⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to present your teams’ ideas and concepts with writing or imagery. This lets you organize the ideas into clear categories or flows of information.

When all of the ideas are clearly laid out, teams can make sense of them and add to them, thus boosting overall team creativity and productivity.

Mind mapping⁠(opens in a new tab or window) is a brainstorming technique that involves creating a hierarchy of relationships that stem from a central theme. This technique is great for remote teams, as team members can contribute to the mind map either asynchronously or synchronously during a brainstorming meeting.

For example, say your theme is about implementing design thinking into your product or service. The first word or phrase in your mind map will be “design thinking,” and it will be placed in the center of your mind map. Then you’ll add various concepts or topics related to design thinking. From there, you’ll add subtopics to those topics, and so on and so forth.

It will end up looking something like this:

Use this mind map⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

Mind mapping tips for better visualizations:

• Use varied text sizes and colors to easily differentiate between topics.
• Keep topics and ideas relatively short but clear to reduce clutter.
• Get creative with images, graphics, or illustrations to make the ideas stand out.
  

Just because you don’t work in a shared office space with your team doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of a digital whiteboard. With a virtual whiteboard⁠(opens in a new tab or window), you and your team can collaborate on ideas in real time or asynchronously. You might even consider doing a “lightning decision jam⁠(opens in a new tab or window)” to really get everyone’s brainstorming juices flowing.

Start a whiteboard⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

Depending on your team’s goals, break down your whiteboard into categories, overarching themes, or other brainstorming questions. For example, say you are interested in improving your team’s productivity. You could design a SWOT analysis⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to brainstorm and gather feedback from your team about current workflows.

In this scenario, you’d have each of your team members add their input on digital “sticky notes” or use affinity diagrams⁠(opens in a new tab or window), and place them under the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats section.

With everyone’s contributions added to the whiteboard, you can begin to ask questions, make suggestions, and consolidate ideas.

Learn how to share designs in Canva⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

A working document is another great brainstorming technique to collaborate on fresh ideas with your remote team. Whether you use a Google Doc or Canva’s Docs⁠(opens in a new tab or window), the beauty of a working doc is that you can add ideas asynchronously as they come to you! You can also leave a comment or question for your teammates and assign it to them from right within the doc.

Everyone who has access to the doc can see each other’s ideas and build on them. And if you get stuck, you can take advantage of Canva’s Magic Write feature⁠(opens in a new tab or window), an AI-powered content generation tool.

If you need to present your ideas to other stakeholders, easily convert your doc to a presentation with Canva’s docs to deck feature.

Starbursting is a brainstorming exercise in which team members must create as many questions as possible that begin with the words: “Who," "What," "Why," "Where," "When," and "How."

As with the previous examples, starbursting is a great brainstorming tool for remote teams that work asynchronously. You can either have your team work in the same starbursting design and add their questions on their own time or make copies of the design and have people work individually so that they are not influenced by previous questions.

Starbursting is typically illustrated as a six-pointed star; however, your team can design any type of symbol or pattern as long as it has six spaces to represent the five w’s and the how.

Once you’re done generating questions, you and your team can work together to answer those questions. Summarize your answers and pick out the key takeaways to develop an action plan⁠(opens in a new tab or window) for next steps.

A flowchart⁠(opens in a new tab or window) can help your team brainstorm by laying out a series of events or consequences in a logical order. Your flowchart design⁠(opens in a new tab or window) may vary depending on the type of problem you are trying to solve. Types of flowcharts include decision⁠(opens in a new tab or window), process⁠(opens in a new tab or window), product⁠(opens in a new tab or window), program evaluation and review technique (PERT)⁠(opens in a new tab or window), and workflows⁠(opens in a new tab or window).

Create a flowchart⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

You can also use a flowchart for “The 5 Whys⁠(opens in a new tab or window),” a brainstorming technique used to develop a solution for a known problem. As a distributed team, share a link to your flowchart design with internal and external stakeholders to get feedback on your solution and show how you came to that solution. As contributors make edits or additions, you can track changes over time and make comments and suggestions in the working flowchart design.

No matter how effective a visual brainstorming tool⁠(opens in a new tab or window) is, there are times when you need to add some novelty to your brainstorming efforts in order to boost idea generation. Since play has been proven to improve creativity⁠(opens in a new tab or window) in the workplace, use unconventional brainstorming techniques that bring out the playful side of your team and help them think from different angles.

Rolestorming or figure storming is a method of brainstorming in which each team member plays the role of another person. The idea is that by improvising and taking on different perspectives than you normally would, your team will generate unexpected ideas.

Identify and assign roles like:

• A demanding customer that your team often faces
• A celebrity, historical figure, or fictional character known for a specific way of thinking/acting
• A specific role on your leadership team
• One of the six thinking hats⁠(opens in a new tab or window) (various types of thinking roles)
• The pessimist/optimist (or Jekyll and Hyde)

Carry out this brainstorming method over a Zoom call in real time, or give your team more time to think and develop a presentation about their ideas.

Have them record a video of themselves as they present⁠(opens in a new tab or window) their idea from that point of view or character.

Not only will your team come up with interesting ideas, but they’ll also share a laugh watching everyone take on these alter egos!

Reverse brainstorming⁠(opens in a new tab or window) is a brainstorming technique that starts with producing the exact opposite of what a typical brainstorming session does: all the ways a plan or idea will fail. Since humans are more inclined to notice problems than solutions, this method leverages our natural abilities to name things that might go wrong.

By turning your attention to potential negative outcomes, your team can analyze each failure or problem statement and figure out how to prevent them. These preventions are called “converted ideas.”

For example, say you are launching a new product with a subscription model. Create a shared table in which “reverse brainstorming ideas” is in one column and “converted ideas” is in the other. Then have your team add their ideas. It might look something like this:

Create your own⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

To completely shake things up, try brainstorming outside of your normal working environment and schedule. A change of scenery, such as changing your physical location, can have a positive effect on your mental health. Happier, healthier people tend to be more creative and productive.

On the days of your brainstorming sessions, ask your team to go somewhere new (but that still has a decent Wi-Fi connection!). Or get even weirder: have your team sit or lay on the floor as they think, put on music and dance, or do an art project together.

You can also try gamifying your brainstorming session by doing rapid ideation. Use Zoom breakout rooms to split up your team into groups and set a time limit. The more ideas they can come up with in that time, the better!

When it comes to brainstorming, emphasize quantity over quality. Encourage a culture of speaking up and expressing opinions, no matter how silly or outlandish their ideas may be. Creative thinking, whether with a group of people or through individual brainstorming, should lead to a larger number of ideas. The more ideas you come up with, the closer you’ll get to the most creative solutions!

Moreover, you’ll have a treasure trove of rejected ideas to refer back to the next time you have a brainstorming ideation session. Just because a concept didn’t work this time around doesn’t mean it should be thrown away for good. Instead, file the ideas away in categorized folders that you and your team can easily find and follow up with in the future. Then the process starts again. Happy brainstorming⁠(opens in a new tab or window)!