If you’ve ever sat through a brainstorming session that felt more like a storm than a productive meeting, you’re not alone.
You know the experience: one or two people dominate the conversation, some team members hold back their best ideas, and everyone ends up fixating on whatever gets mentioned first.
In his book Hidden Potential, Adam Grant proposes something different: brainwriting.
Instead of the jumbled mess of traditional brainstorming, brainwriting follows a clear step-by-step process:
Individual creativity → each person generates ideas independently, without group influence
Anonymous collection → ideas are gathered without names attached
Individual evaluation → each person evaluates and ranks the full set of ideas
Collective refinement → the group discusses and improves the best ideas together
It might seem slower at first, but it’s actually a much steadier process that helps you unearth the collective intelligence within your team.
This approach led to breakthrough ideas when 33 miners were trapped underground in Chile in 2010, including the invention of a miniature yellow plastic telephone that was sent down a hole to allow for communication, and ultimately saved their lives.
So the next time you need to generate new ideas or make important decisions as a group, give brainwriting a try.
And if you want to learn how to make those ideas visual to support those stage of evaluation, refinement, and implementation, then check out The Verbal to Visual Curriculum.
For more good ideas from Hidden Potential, check out that explores other key ideas from the book.
Cheers,
-Doug