Brainstorm, group, and prioritize concepts as a team
Use this template in your own brainstorming sessions so your team can unleash their imagination and start shaping concepts even if you're not sitting in the same room.
Brainstorming provides a free and open environment that encourages everyone within a team to participate in the creative thinking process that leads to problem solving. Prioritizing volume over value, out-of-the-box ideas are welcome and built upon, and all participants are encouraged to collaborate, helping each other develop a rich amount of creative solutions.
The brainstorm and idea prioritization template helps you:
Prepare for your brainstorming session
Define your problem statement
Collect ideas and gather feedback from everyone
Group ideas by theme
Prioritize your solutions and get aligned on next steps
How to use the brainstorm and idea prioritization template
To use the Mural brainstorm and idea prioritization template with your team, follow the steps outlined below.
Step 1: Define goal and invite stakeholders
The first step in the process is to clearly define the goal(s) of your brainstorming session. What problem(s) are you trying to solve? At this stage, you should also carefully select a list of stakeholders who will participate in your brainstorming session.
Step 2: Define your problem statement
The next phase is to create a problem statement that clearly identifies the issue. Frame your problem statement as a ‘How might we?’ question (e.g., ‘How might we shorten wait times for customer service calls?’).
Step 3: Brainstorm!
Have each stakeholder brainstorm as many ideas for possible solutions as they can in a given time.
Pro-tip: Use Mural’s private mode feature to avoid groupthink while brainstorming, allowing everyone to work independently even while synchronous.
Step 4: Group ideas together by theme
Once you’ve generated as many ideas as possible with your team, it’s time to look carefully at the results. What are the natural themes that emerge from your ideation? How should they be grouped together to inform potential solutions?
Step 5: Prioritize solutions
Now that you’ve refined your ideation into themes, you can effectively prioritize the results using the chart tracking importance vs. feasibility.
Tips for running a brainstorming & idea prioritization session
To run a successful brainstorming session and build an idea board, you should:
Make sure you invite stakeholders representing all aspects of the issue at hand so that you can avoid blind spots when brainstorming solutions
Use Mural’s timer feature to keep things on track while brainstorming, and use private mode to avoid groupthink; then, you can leverage a voting session to determine the best next steps!
Keep a record of your brainstorming so that you can return to your ideas and revisit questions over time — this may help generate even more solutions in the future
Brainstorming examples and techniques
There are many established (and highly effective!) brainstorming techniques that you can use to help boost your team's engagement and creativity. We've built out a definitive guide to brainstorming, as well as tips for how to facilitate brainstorming sessions, so that you can get the most out of your time together — regardless of where you are.
But before you begin, it's important to establish the rules of engagement — check out our piece on 7 ground rules for brainstorming to see why.
Common brainstorming techniques
Rapid ideation: This approach is just like it sounds — generate as many ideas as you can (quantity over quality, then filter later)
Brain-netting: This is focused on connecting hybrid and remote teams, capturing everyone's feedback with digital tools, and then connecting related ideas
Round robin: Here, participants write their ideas down during a set time period, before setting them aside to return to later, or passing them along to the next participant to build or comment on
Rolestorming: Participants role-play to place themselves in the mindset of a customer or persona (or even a famous person) to help build empathy and examine things from different perspectives
Mind mapping: This is a way to brain-dump and build out as many related ideas as possible, starting from a central theme (note: Mural now offers AI-assisted mind mapping tools)
If you're really stuck, we've also built out a list of 25 brainstorming questions to kickstart your creative thinking.
A brainstorming template is a structured framework or tool that helps facilitate the brainstorming process. It provides a visual or written format that guides participants in generating ideas, organizing thoughts, and capturing insights during a brainstorming session.
The format of brainstorming can vary depending on the specific template or technique being used. However, a common format includes the following steps:
Define the problem or challenge: Clearly articulate the problem or challenge that the brainstorming session aims to address. This helps focus the participants' thinking and ensures everyone is on the same page.
Generate ideas: Encourage participants to freely and openly generate as many ideas as possible. This can be done individually or in a group setting. The emphasis is on quantity rather than quality at this stage.
Organize and categorize ideas: Once the idea generation phase is complete, group similar ideas together and identify common themes or patterns. This helps organize the ideas and makes it easier to analyze and prioritize them later.
Evaluate and prioritize ideas: Assess the ideas based on criteria such as feasibility, impact, and alignment with goals. Prioritize the ideas that have the highest potential for success or value.
This template prioritizes ideas based on importance and feasibility, but another common method for prioritization is the Eisenhower method. This technique prioritizes ideas based on urgency and importance. The four levels of prioritizing tasks are:
Urgent and important: These tasks are both time-sensitive and have a significant impact on achieving goals or addressing critical issues. They require immediate attention and should be prioritized first.
Important but not urgent: These tasks are important for long-term goals or projects but do not have an immediate deadline. They should be scheduled and given attention after addressing urgent tasks.
Urgent but not important: These tasks have a pressing deadline but may not directly contribute to long-term goals or have a significant impact. They can be delegated or postponed if necessary.
Not urgent and not important: These tasks have little to no impact on goals and can be considered low priority. They can be eliminated, delegated, or scheduled for later when more important tasks are completed.
Yes! Mural’s intuitive tools allow you to easily build diagrams using sticky notes, shapes, and connectors. Once you’ve added all your ideas to the mural, you can then organize it by color-coding or rearranging your notes so that it tells a story visually.
Pro tip: All shapes and connectors can be styled individually to help make the visual hierarchy more clear.
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