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.
To use the Mural Brainstorming & Idea Prioritization template with your team, follow the steps outlined below.
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.
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?’).
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.
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?
Now that you’ve refined your ideation into themes, you can effectively prioritize the results using the chart tracking importance vs. feasibility.
To run a successful brainstorming session and build an idea board, you should:
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.
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:
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:
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.
Mural is the only platform that offers both a shared workspace and training on the LUMA System™, a practical way to collaborate that anyone can learn and apply.