10 brainstorming techniques for idea generation

Creative thinking, problem-solving, and innovation depend heavily on strong brainstorming techniques. At its most basic, brainstorming simply means identifying a problem, and then coming up with as many fresh ideas as possible that may help solve that problem. In practice, however, brainstorming needs to be structured to be successful.

No matter which brainstorming method you try, keep these tips in mind:

• Use a shared digital space to conduct your brainstorming. This not only makes brainstorming easier, but also ensures you don’t lose any ideas and have a document to refer to in the future.
• Group ideas by shared themes during and after your brainstorming session. AI tools can really help with this when brainstorming in a digital canvas.
• Encourage quantity over quality. Participants can often get hung up on having the “best idea” but this often leads to creative blocks. Focus on generating a high number of ideas first, then refine to the best ones.
• You don’t always need a facilitator, but one can help guide a group of people through the ideation process by providing structure and prompting ideas.

Types of brainstorming: 10 techniques for better idea generation

1. Question brainstorming

What it is:

Question brainstorming is just what the name implies — a method where participants come up with as many questions about the problem as possible but no answers. This helps the group build a complete understanding of the problem without the pressure to prematurely find a perfect solution.

How to do it:

1. Each individual (or small group) takes 10-15 minutes to write as many questions about the central topic or problem under discussion.
2. After 10-15 minutes, the group gets back together to share, group, and prioritize the questions.
3. Start answering questions the group finds most important or significant to help understand issues at the heart of the problem.

Need inspiration? Check out these 25 questions for effective brainstorms.

2. Hybrid brainstorming

What it is:

A great way to get the most out of your brainstorm is to combine asynchronous idea generation with real-time conversation. This technique starts off with individual brainstorming and ends with a collaborative group session.

How to do it:

1. Choose a set of top questions (3-5) before your group session.
2. Each participant begins brainstorming in their own dedicated space.
3. Collect ideas in a shared digital space to create a single repository.
4. Vote as a group on the top solutions to each question (or generate new ideas in a collaborative setting).

3. Mind map brainstorming

What it is:

The mind mapping brainstorming technique helps your team use the central focus of your project as a starting point, explore all the potential variables tied to it, and build an understanding of how those variables relate to the core idea as well as to one another.

How to do it:

1. Start with a core topic or question at the center of the mind map.
2. Add branches and nodes based on secondary thoughts related to the primary topic. 
3. Keep adding branches and nodes to existing branches on the mind map, creating a robust set of related ideas.

4. Starbursting

What it is:

Starbursting is a divergent thinking approach focused on quickly asking a targeted set of questions about a topic in order to generate a wide range of ideas. You can think of it as a focused expansion on the question brainstorm method.

How to do it:

1. In Mural, add six sticky notes around a central idea or problem and label them “Who,” “What,” “Where,” “When,” “Why,” and “How.”
2. For each term, encourage participants to generate as many questions as possible.
3. Once the questions have been generated, suggest answers to them as a group.
4. The facilitator can use other ideation techniques to further refine these ideas and identify potential solutions to the problem. Try clustering similar ideas together (Mural AI is great for clustering), categorizing the ideas into different groups with tags, or prioritizing the ideas based on their potential impact or feasibility.

5. Crazy 8s

What it is:

The “crazy eights” brainstorming technique strives for both quantity and efficiency by prompting participants to generate a set of ideas in a fixed time frame. You’ll brainstorm eight different solutions in just eight minutes, after which you can review the ideas and agree on the most effective solution.

How to do it:

1. Have each participant take a piece of paper (or use an online whiteboard) and divide it into eight parts.
2. Spend one minute sketching or detailing an idea in each panel (for a total of eight minutes).
3. Have each participant share their own ideas.
4. Vote on the top ideas and turn them into actionable next steps.

6. Round-robin brainstorming

What it is:

The round-robin brainstorm method asks you to divide your team into individuals or small groups and have each of them take turns ideating sequentially. Each person passes their ideas along to a teammate, who then offers counterpoints or further suggestions, helping to strengthen them or identify potential weaknesses.

How to do it:

1. Divide your group or participants into teams and divide your whiteboard space into an equal number of panels.
2. Have each group or participant write down a proposal and move to the next panel.
3. Each group looks at the previous group’s suggestion and adds either a potential weakness or a suggestion.
4. Rotate and repeat until each group has addressed each panel.
5. Have each group craft a final proposal taking into account the feedback they’ve received from other groups in their panel.

Looking for more instruction? Check out our complete guide to round-robin brainstorming with a walkthrough, tips, and variations on the round-robin method.

7. 6-3-5 brainstorming

What it is:

6-3-5 brainstorming (which actually can be thought of more as “brainwriting”) is a technique that focuses on speed. To run this exercise, you'll need six participants to create three ideas each in a five-minute round. Six rounds will generate 108 ideas in just 30 minutes.

How to do it:

1. Each participant selects one panel of the 6-3-5 template and generates three ideas for ways to address the central problem statement.
2. After five minutes, participants move to a different panel and complete another round of ideation, using the previous row of ideas for inspiration.
3. Repeat for a total of six rounds.
4. Cluster and vote on the winning ideas with your team.

Brainwriting can be a marked improvement over more conventional brainstorming methods. In addition to reducing the pressure to openly share ideas that might be a bit "out there," brainwriting can help reduce participation inequity and prevent groupthink. Learn more in Mural's guide to brainwriting.

8. Reverse brainstorming

What it is:

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to really drill down into its causes. Instead of asking, "What can we do to solve this problem?" the question becomes, "How can we create this problem or make it worse?” Once the "reverse" ideas have been generated, participants can then work to flip them around and find ways to turn them into positive solutions.

How to do it:

1. Draft a problem statement or starting topic for your team to brainstorm on.
2. Instead of posing the question: “How can we fix this?” ask “How can we make this problem worse?”
3. Identify root causes driving the problem and propose ways to create their inverse.
4. Review and prioritize ideas taking into account feasibility and potential impact.

9. Silent circuit

What it is:

The silent circuit is a quiet brainstorming technique that helps groups ideate across multiple topics while still being inclusive of quieter participants. This method is great for large groups, hybrid teams, and teams with introverts.

How to do it:

1. Write "how might we" questions or a different prompt at the top of each section of a brainstorming template.
2. Set a timer and encourage participants to pan around the canvas and silently add as many ideas on sticky notes as they can under each prompt.
3. When time is up, participants return to their original question and share all the ideas for each category.
4. Review answers and create action items for the best ideas.

10. Brain-netting

What it is:

Brain-netting is a term that covers any traditional brainstorming session conducted online. In today’s hybrid and distributed environments, these are likely more common than conventional colocated brainstorms. The improvement of virtual collaboration tools (especially the inclusion of powerful AI features) has made this method even more productive.

How to do it:

1. Kickoff the session and warm up your team with a virtual icebreaker that can be done asynchronously.
2. Add a problem statement or define a topic to ideate over.
3. Brainstorm together or set a deadline for when team members should have asynchronously added their ideas to the brainstorming template.
4. Synthesize the ideas together, or summarize them and share the common themes.
5. Prioritize ideas and align on next steps.

Related: How to facilitate a brainstorming session

Why effective brainstorming methods are essential for innovation

Brainstorming gets you to outcomes faster

Whether you’re at the beginning of a product development cycle or starting to create an account plan for your next big client, nothing slows you down quite like a lack of good ideas. A productive brainstorming session can be just what you need to reach alignment and decisions quickly instead of letting questions drag out over lengthy email chains. 

Brainstorming fosters creative thinking

If you’re facing a difficult problem, brainstorming can help you generate potential solutions that you might not have thought of otherwise. The free-flowing nature of brainstorming is meant to encourage exploration and a diversity of ideas — even those suggestions that seem tangential or unrelated at first may wind up forming the basis for effective solutions later on, or as inspiration for new products or features.

Brainstorming puts your best ideas in one place

Brainstorming helps you organize your team's thoughts and feedback on any project. By structuring your brainstorming sessions so that everyone is engaged and all ideas are recorded, you can quickly assess which ideas are worth pursuing and which ones are not, and begin to immediately outline actionable next steps.

Brainstorming creates a scalable process for innovation

When you identify a brainstorming method that works best for your team, you can create a repeatable process for sparking innovation. Over time, this not only helps your group tackle individual problems more effectively but also strengthens the organization’s overall capacity to generate and implement new ideas.

Tips for productive brainstorming

Establish an environment of psychological safety

One of the most important elements in unlocking effective brainstorming is establishing a culture and environment of psychological safety. A brainstorming session should be one where everyone feels comfortable contributing without self-editing — in this phase, ideation shouldn't be interrupted by critiques or pushback. It's simply about collecting as many ideas and different perspectives as possible.

Psychological safety also means you are less likely to be impeded by groupthink — if the brainstorming session is characterized by a wide array of ideas and even constructive disagreement, you will have a much better basis upon which to formulate potential solutions than if everyone agrees or one line of thinking dominates your discussion.

Use private brainstorming within the context of a group meeting

Tools like private mode when using Mural can encourage individual thinking by allowing each participant to contribute to the canvas on their own without seeing the input of others which could influence them. When working in a shared digital space like Mural, asynchronous brainstorming is also a viable solution for allowing individuals to ideate on their own before sharing their contributions with the group.

Related: 7 Key Rules for Brainstorming

Follow-up after the brainstorming session

Brainstorming ideas is only the first step. After the brainstorming session is over, the team moves into the implementation phase. Be sure to define next steps and the roles of each team member so everyone understands the workflow and what’s expected of them. By following up, you ensure the ideas you captured don’t get forgotten and set your team up for implementing an effective solution.

Define a strategic goal for your brainstorm meeting

An effective brainstorm needs to ladder up to a specific business goal. Are you at the very outset of a problem with a lot of variables, and trying to better understand how they relate to one another? Is the purpose of your meeting to discover new ways to improve user experience for a given product or feature? Each use case can lead you to select a specific brainstorming method to best address it.

Use these techniques to run better brainstorming sessions

Brainstorming is an essential part of the innovation process, but it can be difficult to come up with new ideas if you’re not sure where to start. The techniques outlined in this post should help you structure your brainstorming sessions in a way that makes them more effective and helps you reach alignment and outcomes faster.

If you want to make your brainstorming sessions even more productive, using a shared digital space like Mural not only unlocks visual thinking and online collaboration, but also builds in strategies to combat issues with groupthink and allows for hybrid brainstorming sessions that combine the best of asynchronous and real-time meetings.