How to run a brainstorming session

Use Confluence whiteboards to structure and organize ideas

Whiteboard sessions can be critical creative time, true. A brainstorming session should set your team loose, giving everyone the bandwidth they need to pop out ideas without any fear of being shot down.

But creative ideation exercises will only get you so far. Whiteboards can be great for structuring a loose collection of ideas into a campaign, a project, or a new initiative. 

The problem with traditional whiteboards is this can require a lot of erasing, modifying, and editorial back-and-forth. Confluence whiteboards, on the other hand, offer some digital assistance when it comes to organizing your ideas. 

• You can illustrate the relationship between ideas with stickies, lines, and sections—just like you could if you were standing at a whiteboard with a marker in your hand

• Start assigning Jira tasks and sub-tasks to individual team members so that you come away from a brainstorming session with more than just ideas—you come away with a team to-do list

Create templates and dedicated pages for brainstorming and creative ideation exercises

A physical whiteboard is just that: a board with a lot of white space. But Confluence whiteboards can pre-populate with best-practice templates, giving you a head start for any brainstorming session:

• Brainstorming templates will populate with notes for kicking off those game-changing “what-if” questions.
• Retrospective templates help you conduct exit interviews on old projects: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
• Prioritization matrixes split up the whiteboard into a grid so you can organize (and therefore prioritize) the decisions your team is facing.
• Team formation guides are great for assigning users to specific projects within your organization, which can lead to separate brainstorming sessions via Confluence.
• Concept maps can be critical for mapping out team resources, workflows, and planning multiple projects simultaneously.

There aren’t any features you’d lose from moving to a digital whiteboard. Sticky notes? You can use them. Stamps? Use those to react and vote for your favorite ideas. Everything you can do with a physical whiteboard, you can do with a Confluence whiteboard, all while crossing time zones with ease. It’ll be as if you’re all in the same room.

Synchronize a team’s inspiration from a single source of truth

Company-wide collaboration is the name of the game. If you can’t have your whole team in the room with a single whiteboard, you may feel you’ve left critical team members out. The result: you’re not getting the inspiration from multiple angles and backgrounds asking key questions during a brainstorming session.

But Confluence changes all that. You can automatically sync new updates to your Confluence Homepage, or add project-specific updates to a Confluence whiteboard. We’re also planning on introducing features like “@” mentions to ensure colleague discussions are easy to reference and redirect.

In a traditional whiteboard setting, you might have someone taking minutes. With Confluence whiteboards, you can have a virtual brainstorming session and proceed across time zones as if you never missed a beat.

There’s also a neat feature for integrating these whiteboards with Jira. 

You can use Confluence whiteboards to group a specific set of tasks, ideas, or assignments. Smart sections ensure you don’t have to make updates to Jira issues after planning sessions. You and your team can move work forward without having to go back and revise in Jira. Essentially, you can set up sections with configured Jira actions, which then apply to all current Jira tickets in the sections. Use this feature to mass-update fields like priority, assignee, story points, and more.

And it works two ways, as well. Team members can upload their notes or web links to the whiteboard so everyone can reference them. The result: your virtual brainstorming sessions seamlessly segue into a to-do list, much like a project management tool.

Embed images and links to help illustrate your ideas and make them more engaging

At a certain point, the “analog” whiteboard runs out of features. You can paste sticky notes to a whiteboard, maybe even print off an image and tape it to the thing. But once you have videos, webinars, and conference calls that need to be part of the project, no whiteboard will help.

Well, there’s one. 

The Confluence whiteboard can embed images to illustrate your ideas. Rather than a whiteboard full of long swaths of text, images can get ideas across much more quickly. That’s especially relevant for visual and design-based projects.

If you’re building a whiteboard, you can also use this feature to assign tasks to your team members. You can highlight virtual brainstorming sessions so a copywriter knows what to write about. You can record yourself giving live notes to provide feedback to a designer. Or you can simply paste a video link you saw online, giving additional context and background to anyone on your team who needs it.

Start collaborative whiteboarding sessions for remote teams

Some features in Confluence whiteboards can help remote team members keep up, even if they’re not in the loop on the initial whiteboard session. But we haven’t yet addressed how collaborative this process can be. 

With a Confluence whiteboard, your sessions aren’t limited to who’s in the room. You can build a session online, either on the computer or live within a conference room, and involve everyone on your remote team. You don’t have to abandon team members across the globe and wait for them to catch up. And you don’t have to miss out on their spontaneous insights or reactions, either.

Don’t forget about the scientific importance of flow state. Spontaneity and live reactions matter to creativity. As one study noted, “the possibility of surprise” is one essential ingredient of flow. In brainstorming sessions, when a good idea pops out, it instantly stimulates that sense of flow.

That’s an effect you can’t capture as easily via email. It takes live interaction and spontaneous reactions to generate that creative flow—ultimately leading to better ideas on your whiteboard.

3. Set the stage

It’s easy to auto-default to the same old conference room every time you need to call a meeting. But our brains love novelty, and being in a new location can also exercise our brain’s neuroplasticity, or our ability to think about things in a new way. By switching up locations, you can improve the quality of ideas that come out of that brainstorm. Try heading out to that picnic table behind the office, the cafe around the corner, or even a different room in your workspace.

If you can’t access an alternative meeting space, bring a new element to the old routine. Switch up those unspoken claims on whose chair is whose or become the office MVP with a surprise treat.

Opinions vary on the best runtime of a brainstorming session and depend on the individual team(s). Would 30 minutes work best for a deadline-driven team, or would they prefer closer to an hour to let the ideas free flow? Are they fresher in the morning or with some post-lunch fuel in the tank? Try a few variations to find what works best for your group.