Steps

• Everyone has a brainwriting sheet.
• At the start, each person on the team starts writing possible influencing factors in the top row of boxes.
• Describe one influence factor per box.
• Fill in as many boxes of the first row as possible.
• After five minutes, each passes his/her sheet to the right-hand neighbour.
• Read what your predecessor in the first row wrote.
• Now start writing new influence factors yourself on the second row or further specifying or fleshing out what you have read on the first row. Factors you have already written down once should not be written down a second time.
• Fill in as many boxes as possible on the second row.
• After five minutes, pass again to the right-hand neighbour and everything repeats.
• Once you have your starting sheet back, read all the influence factors. If you came up with an influence factor during the process that you think is important but is not on your sheet, you may fill in that factor in the bottom box.

• Select for yourself the three to five most likely factors.
• The facilitator asks each person for their three to five most likely influence factors and writes them on the flipchart.
• The facilitator guides the discussion on these selected points, asking for the underlying arguments or experiences.
• By giving each team member five stickers and letting them distribute them as they see fit among the influence factors listed, the top three to five five rolls out naturally.

 Examples

Example of a brainstorming exercise about developing an online meeting platform.

Template Brainwriting (klik <here> om deze te downloaden)

Tips:

• As much as possible, make sure that people really build on the idea that was put forward earlier.
• Five minutes is sometimes quite long for a round. You could basically shorten that.