Brainstorming: we've all tried it, but how many of us have done it effectively online? How many of us have enjoyed it? In this chapter of our series on the art of online brainstorming, we're sharing 20 brainstorming techniques and frameworks you can try on your own or with your team – remotely!
- Curio 11 4 – Brainstorming And Project Management Approaches
- Curio 11 4 – Brainstorming And Project Management Apps
1. Mind Mapping
Mind mapping helps you diagram a collection of disparate thoughts. Boxy: email client for inbox by gmail 1 1 1. Using an organizational structure, you start by drawing a central node and then use lines, symbols, colors, images, and words to connect that node to other information.
What can Curio do for you? In Curio, create a project to represent a real-world project that you're working on. Next fill it with everything related to that project including notes, images, PDF's, documents, web links, multimedia, and much, much more. You can place this information anywhere on Curio's freeform idea spaces. Or use Curio's integrated mind maps, lists, tables, index.
Curio is a powerful and easy-to-use brainstorming and project management application that promotes visual thinking for gathering and shaping your ideas, while managing all the notes and documents associated with your project. Curio's intuitive interface and tools encourage effective note gathering, research, and creative exploration. Facilitating a brainstorming session is a critical skill expected from a Project Manager. The PMBOK version 4 states Brainstorming as a recommended item for some Knowledge Areas, such as Project Risk Management., and the PMP exam has questions on Brainstorming. As a project manager, you must know how to conduct a brainstorming session effectively utilizing the best practices of brainstorming. Curio is the premier brainstorming and project-management application designed to promote visual thinking.Using Curio's innovative freeform interface and tools, you can intuitively gather, associate, and recall your ideas, while easily managing all the notes and documents associated with your project.
2. Brain Writing
Brain Writing is an approach to online brainstorming that helps improve focus and organization. Unlike normal free-form brainstorming where a group comes together and yells out creative ideas and one person tries to capture them on a whiteboard or in a document, brain writing is a quieter activity with individual work time followed by group collaboration.
It works wonders for introverted personalities and can be a way to source a lot of ideas — it works well with a few or a lot of participants. It's a technique that can also work well in combination with other brainstorming methods, like S.C.A.M.P.E.R, which we'll get into next.
3. S.C.A.M.P.E.R.
This helpful acronym allows you to improve ideas by poking at them from different angles. It works great when combined with a brain writing session. S.C.A.M.P.E.R. stands for:
Substitute (What would happen if we swapped X for Y?)
Combine (What would happen if we combined X and Y?)
Adapt (How could we adapt this thing to a different context?)
Modify (How could we modify this product to add more value?)
Garrys mod free 2019. Put to Another Use (What other uses might this project have?) Movist pro media player for macos 2 2 8.
Eliminate (What could we remove from this project?)
Reverse (How might we reorganize this project to make it more effective?). Utilize the templates to track everyone's responses.
4. Lightning Decision Jam
A technique created by our friends at design agency AJ&Smart, the Lightning Decision Jam is a great way to brainstorm around a broad topic. According to them, it's 'the perfect workshop to solve big problems quickly,' helping you to replace all open-ended, unstructured meetings with a clear process. Instead of never-ending discussions, 'you can use this simple exercise to encourage creativity and foster innovation.' For example, they use it for:
The conversion flow of checkout on their site
An internal design process
Organizing events
Keeping up with the competition
Improving sales flow
It only takes about 40 minutes to run and always leaves you and your team feeling involved, energized, productive – and it gives you tangible, actionable results.
5. Rapid Ideation
Giving your group a time limit, have everyone write as many ideas as possible on a piece of paper, sticky note, or in an e-doc. When that's done, you can have the group vote on the best ideas, discuss what everyone came up with, or you can give the ideas to a 'decider' to pick the most actionable. You can easily time your group's rapid ideation session using Miro's Stickies Bulk Mode, mind map, or Countdown Timer features.
6. Random Word Picker
Also called 'free association,' you draw random words from a bank. You then go around the group and invite team members to draw associations between those words at the topic at hand. Use the template to keep track of all the associations.
7. The Idea Napkin
Created by the UX design team at ORBIT, The Idea Napkin method 'encourages a vast variety – as well as diverging quality – of ideas.' It allows brainstorming participants to enrich and enhance their ideas by applying a structured approach, allowing for better assessment and comparison of ideas. Check out their Miro template to give it a try.
8. Reverse Brainstorming
The concept behind reverse brainstorming is simple. Instead of brainstorming solutions to one problem, you brainstorm actual problems. This allows a different perspective: humans have a natural ability to see problems more easily than solutions, so you can use this to identify hurdles your team might face when working on a project. Think of it as a way to tap a group to brainstorm all the ways a plan could fail. Then you can start problem solving.
7. The Idea Napkin
Created by the UX design team at ORBIT, The Idea Napkin method 'encourages a vast variety – as well as diverging quality – of ideas.' It allows brainstorming participants to enrich and enhance their ideas by applying a structured approach, allowing for better assessment and comparison of ideas. Check out their Miro template to give it a try.
8. Reverse Brainstorming
The concept behind reverse brainstorming is simple. Instead of brainstorming solutions to one problem, you brainstorm actual problems. This allows a different perspective: humans have a natural ability to see problems more easily than solutions, so you can use this to identify hurdles your team might face when working on a project. Think of it as a way to tap a group to brainstorm all the ways a plan could fail. Then you can start problem solving.
9. The Pitch Canvas©
The Pitch Canvas© by David Beckett is a brainstorming tool to help entrepreneurs think through their pitch to investors, partners and customers. It involves three steps to generate ideas, refine ideas, and build a storyline that'll help you talk about relevant business topics with certainty and confidence.
10. Round Robin
The round robin technique starts by inviting one participant to share an idea. You then go around the group and have each person share an idea that builds off of the previous ones. Think of it as real-time improv — you say 'yes, and' to an idea to build upon it as a group.
11. How Now Wow
The How Now Wow matrix is a tool you can use to brainstorm ideas and organize them based on their originality and ease of implementation. 'How' is used to describe ideas that are innovative but not yet feasible, 'Now' refers to ideas that are familiar, easy to implement, and proven to work well, and 'Wow' describes ideas that are new but still easy to implement. The goal of using the matrix is to come up with as many 'Wow' ideas as possible.
12. Step Ladder
This group brainstorming technique encourages everyone to contribute. Start by allowing two members of the group to discuss the topic at hand. Then add a third member of the group to the discussion. Add a fourth, a fifth, and so on, until everyone has contributed.
13. Storyboarding
A storyboard is a sequence of illustrations that are used to develop a story. Many businesses use storyboarding to understand and map customer experiences. The technique is instrumental for aligning your team, pitching an idea, understanding the customer journey, and much more.
14. Six Thinking Hats
This method encourages you to wear different 'hats' and think about a problem from various angles: thinking about the available data, using your intuition, looking at potentially negative outcomes, thinking about positive outcomes, looking at a problem creatively, and thinking about how to control a process. A template can be useful here because it helps you keep track of everyone's 'hats' for a particular problem.
15. SWOT Analysis
The SWOT in SWOT analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It allows you to consider all angles when planning your business's strategy.
16. Brain Netting
Brain netting is simply brainstorming over the internet. But there are a lot of creative ways to do it: group calls, chat apps, video conferencing, and much more. Regardless of how you do it, it's vital to have an online whiteboard to record your ideas and sketch out plans.
Mac game deals. Learn how to use Miro's online whiteboard to brainstorm online
17. Wishing
Wishing is exactly what it sounds like! Think about your ideals: features, products, or plans that you wish you could build. What makes them unattainable? Why aren't they possible? Thinking about the impossible might help you unlock some creative possibilities.
18. Five Whys
The Five Whys is a framework for brainstorming the root of a problem. Fundamentally, the approach is simple: you ask why a given problem happened, and then you ask 'why' four more times. It allows you to have a focused discussion so you don't get distracted by other topics. Start with a problem statement, examine why that problem exists, then continue moving through each problem until you identify a core issue that you can act upon.
19. Word Banking
Take the typical free association game to the next level. After free associating words and ideas, form groups of terms that describe just a few topics. Use these word banks to break a process or project down into manageable chunks.
20. Crazy Eights
A way to ideate creative solutions to a problem, Crazy Eights involved giving each participant a template that has eight boxes. You set a timer for eight minutes, then ask each person to sketch eight quick ideas. Once time is up, go around and share. Repeat this process to allow folks to build off of each others' ideas.
Try these techniques yourself
These are just a few ways to boost idea generation and creative thinking, and ultimately make your brainstorming sessions more productive and enjoyable. Check out Miro's free brainstorming templates for more ways to brainstorm yourself.
Ready to get the ideas flowing with your remote team? Try Miro's free online brainstorming tool.
Curio from Zengobi is a project management app and digital note book with tons of features, which I use to plan and organise my writing projects. Curio recently had a major update and is now even more full featured than before. Some of the things Curio has to offer include:
- mind mapping tools
- an outliner
- index cards
- text boxes and rich text files
- free drawing
- notes
- import of photos and videos
- split screen for viewing different idea spaces side by side
- the ability to easily import and export a wide range of documents
- a scrapbook that is available across all your projects
- audio recording
- integrated browser
- Evernote integration
In this post, I'll cover some of the features I find useful in Curio, and talk about how I use it for research purposes.
The basic infrastructure and user interface
Curio is organised around projects and idea spaces. I create a new project for every piece of academic writing. Each project is made up of different idea spaces, which is essentially a white canvas which you can fill with any piece of data or information you might need. Here is an example of an idea space with a mind map, an outline, a text box, an index card and some instant documents. Instant documents are files that are integrated in your idea space, and can include Word, Powerpoint or OmniOutliner files. This helps you keep everything related to one project in one place.
To the left, you will see the organiser pane. Here you can create different idea spaces and rich text documents within the same project, and you can also add different sections and folders to your project if you need to more levels of organisation to your idea spaces. You can hide the organiser pane when you are working with idea spaces to get the most out of your screen estate.
At the bottom of the left toolbar, you can add the filter menu, which will allow you to search and organise your idea spaces based on tags, labels, last time of modification, or an open word search.
In the toolbar at the bottom, there are a range of options for inserting new things to your idea space, importing and exporting files, and adjusting the scale of the idea space.
Along the top, there is a menu bar that let's you adjust a number of attributes of an idea space or a single item. For example, you can change the orientation of a mind map, the colours of an index card, the formatting of text, add tags or notes, or schedule tasks related to your project.
In the screen shot below, you will see the library pane to the right. The library pane has three sub sections: project, scrapbook and Evernote. Here you will find a list of all the documents imported to your project, your Curio scrapbook (more about the scrapbook below), and all of your Evernotes, if you have integrated your Evernote account with Curio.
Useful features
I frequently use the mind mapping and outlining tools to generate and organise ideas. Mind maps and outlines come in different styles, with a range of options for visual customisation. A nice feature is that you can easily convert a mind map to an outline and vice versa through a couple of clicks. You can also import outlines from other apps in opml format.
A very nice feature that came with the latest upgrade is the ability to view two idea spaces side by side. This is useful, for example, if you are trying to write up an article outline or a brief summary, based on an initial brainstorming conducted in a mind map. Here is a screen shot for illustration:
Curio also comes with an integrated web browser. This is useful if you want to integrate web references in your project without having to leave the app. Just select ‘web view' from the toolbar at the bottom, and a browser immediately appears in your idea space. Here's an example of a literature search conducted in web view, where I've added a note:
Another thing I really like in Curio are instant documents. These are documents from other apps that are embedded into your Curio idea space (see the first screen shot above for an illustration). This brings the advantage of keeping everything related to a given project in one space, placing different files in particular relationship with each other, or assigning them a specific place within Curio workflows. At the same time, you maintain the the formatting and features of apps external to Curio. Instant document formats include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OmniOutliner, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
A final thing I'll highlight is the Evernote integration. If you use Evernote for your research, this is an excellent feature, which allows you to directly access your EN notes inside Curio and add them to your idea spaces (it does not, however, let you modify your EN notes or ‘upload' from Curio).
Importing and exporting
When working in Curio, you can import a wide range of files to your idea spaces, such as photos, videos, documents created in word, power point or excel, or outlines created in other mind mapping apps (opml files).
Curio 11 4 – Brainstorming And Project Management Approaches
You can also transfer text and files to Curio via the scrapbook. To send text or files to the scrapbook from other apps, you can:
- add text via the general ‘services' feature
- drag text or files to the Curio icon in the dock
- use ‘print to Curio scrapbook' in the print menu
- from your web browser, use the Curio bookmarklet
There are a wide range of export options for all levels of your Curio files: you can export whole projects, selected idea spaces, or individual figures within an idea space. If you are a mac mail user, there is also a ‘mail as…' feature – unfortunately this doesn't work with other email clients.
How I use it to support my research
I use Curio as a hub to manage my writing projects. I create one Curio project per writing project. Within that project, I will usually
– first use the mind mapping tools and the tables to generate and organise ideas, and to support my initial sorting of data.
– Once this stage of the process has progressed, I tend to switch to the outlining tools to create more structured outlines Launchbar 6 4 1 – powerful fileurlemail launcher utility. for my writing. At this point, you can convert your mind maps to outlines with a few clicks, but I often prefer to start a new outline because I feel it helps my thinking process to start from scratch. I'll use a split screen view where I have old mind maps, notes or tables on the screen to the right, and my ‘fresh' outline on the left screen.
– In parallel to this process, I will usually be reviewing literature, so I might use Curio to review concepts or themes by using the mind mapping function to take literature notes (more on this process in this previous post), or by using the scrap book to import sections of a text or notes from Circus Ponies notebooks that I use to develop my outlines.
3d design software free download. – Finally, I may write up someinitial pieces of text using a rich text document.
Curio 11 4 – Brainstorming And Project Management Apps
I use Scrivener to actually write my articles; so the division of labour between Curio and Scrivener is that a lot of the initial idea generation, organisation and structuring of the text-to-be takes place in Curio, in conjunction with work on literature and data. Then, when I have a clearer idea about how to write up my argument, I'll switch to Scrivener and import the things I need that I generated in Curio. I find Curio preferable for that initial process of brainstorming and organising ideas, because of the flexible way you can work with mind mapping, outlining and other forms of idea organisation.
Some final comments
Now, for some more critical remarks: The most common argument I've seen against Curio is that it is the jack of all trades and the master of none. For example, there are outlining tools out there with more features, such as OmniOutliner which offers multiple columns, or mind mapping apps that offer more features than Curio. I think there is something to this argument, and it will come down your personal requirements and work flow whether you want a comprehensive app that does a lot of things at a reasonably high level, or a range of separate apps that are more sophisticated at their individual tasks. For my purposes, Curio meets most of my needs. Even when I want to use other apps (for example, I frequently use OmniOutliner or NovaMind), I often import the results to Curio, because I like having everything related to a given writing project in one place. However, there is no fixed answer to this – it just depends on what your needs are, and how you prefer to organise your work.
Another consideration with regard to this app is how much screen estate you have. To really maximise the benefits of Curio, you need a large screen. If you do most of your writing on an 11″ Air, you might not be able to take full advantage of what Curio has to offer. I use it regularly (and happily) on my 13″ Air, but I also like to connect to a larger, external monitor so I can spread my ideas out on a larger canvas.
This post is by no means an exhaustive review. There are many features in Curio that I haven't covered here, as I have primarily focussed on things that I find useful for my own work flow. If you want to know more about what Curio can do, check out their web site and their comprehensive user manual. A final thing I'll say in favour of Curio is that their customer service is, at least in my experience, outstanding – very responsive, comprehensive, and helpful. Hopper disassembler 3 7 9 download free.
