Silent Brainstorming with Ideaflip's Private Scratchpads

Here at Ideaflip we're big fans of a technique called the 'Silent Brainstorm'. In fact, Ideaflip wouldn't exist without it!

In contrast with a traditional brainstorm, it's a structured approach that helps to get the best out of everyone in the team.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the brilliant Thinking Fast, Slow, identified the pitfalls of something called the ‘Halo Effect’. In groups, generally those who are the most confident or most forceful are the ones whose ideas get picked up and taken forward, regardless of the strength of their arguments.

By having a silent brainstorm and asking each participant to present their ideas in turn, democratically, not only does everyone get an equal hearing, the ideas themselves are given a fairer hearing, with less bias from social dynamics.

So, how does it work?

How to Run a Silent Brainstorm

There are five stages to running a silent brainstorm:

1. define the goal - this is a very important part of the process, the facilitator should clearly state what the topic of the brainstorm is - ideally concisely describing the context and aims of the meeting.

2. the silence - individually each participant quietly sits and writes down ideas on sticky notes. Each idea should be written on a new note

   • separate anything with an 'and'! Aim for a very short sentence (not a single word, nor an essay) on each.

   Keep going until everyone has run out of ideas - and then keep going for just a bit longer! Often, once the obvious ideas are out, the discomfort of this final stretch can pull out the most valuable and unexpected contributions.

3. take turns to share - each person should present one of their ideas by placing the sticky note into the middle of the board and briefly describing how it relates to the goal in their own words. Interruptions should be kept to a minimum and limited to clarification questions only.

   During this process there will often be seemingly duplicate ideas, but each person should describe how their version differs from what's already been presented. Feel free to update or annotate one of the sticky notes with extra clarifying description if necessary.

   Also, during this process, individuals may think of new ideas or things they've missed or overlooked - these should be captured on new notes to be presented in a later turn.

4. organise - at this point you should use the layout of the notes to reflect common or related themes. This is usually done by clustering notes together into groups. If your team is small enough this can also be done silently (or at least reasonably quietly) with everyone moving ideas around. This is both quick and can reveal surprisingly different perspectives!

5. assess and summarise - depending on the goal of the session, the final part of the process is to prepare the groups of ideas for the next steps. This could be something like:

   • naming the groups of similar ideas for easy referral
   • silent voting for each person's top 3-5 ideas
   • capturing the board for reporting back or a follow up session

At the end of the silent brainstorm everyone should have had a chance to contribute and everyone is likely to have a much better understanding of what the team as a whole thinks.

Private Scratchpads - Space to Think

One of the difficulties of running a silent brainstorm meeting using an online whiteboard is that everyone's notes are visible while they're being written. The usual approach to this is for each participant to 'claim' (or be allocated) a part of the board for them to work in - with an informal agreement to not 'peek' 🫣.

Ideaflip takes a different approach - using it's unique new feature of Private Scratchpads. This feature, a facilitator tool that's available on any of our paid plans, enables each user to write and organise their notes in a private workspace before sharing them.

Private scratchpads are switched off by default, but are easily enabled by tapping on the Tools tab in the side drawer and then tapping the slider to enable them.

All board users will then be able to access their own scratchpad by clicking on the lozenge at the botom of the screen. The workspace area can be dragged up and down - and works just like the shared part of the Ideaflip board. Just drag notes to it, and click twice on them to edit.

Note that the little bar showing your team mates at the top right of the screen has mini-activity indicators under each person's avatar icon. This shows roughly how many notes each person has added to their scratchpad and gives a rough idea of how folk are getting on.