Catalog
method#Product#Delivery#Governance

Brainwriting

Brainwriting is a facilitated, written ideation technique where participants collect ideas individually and pass them around in rounds for iterative development.

Brainwriting is a structured creativity technique where participants first write ideas individually and then iteratively pass and develop them in rounds.
Established
Low

Classification

  • Low
  • Organizational
  • Organizational
  • Intermediate

Technical context

Miro / Mural templatesConfluence / Notion for documentationGoogle Docs / Sheets for follow-up

Principles & goals

Writing increases participation and diversity.Timeboxing creates focus and comparability.Anonymity reduces dominance and bias.
Discovery
Team, Domain

Use cases & scenarios

Compromises

  • Unclear rules lead to low participation.
  • Too short timeboxes prevent depth.
  • Poor documentation loses idea history.
  • Adhere to and communicate timeboxes clearly.
  • Use anonymity to lower social inhibitions.
  • Document results and structure them for follow-up.

I/O & resources

  • Clear problem or task statement
  • Facilitation script and schedule
  • Working materials (paper, whiteboard, digital board)
  • Collection of raw ideas
  • Categorized idea clusters
  • Selection of prioritized concepts

Description

Brainwriting is a structured creativity technique where participants first write ideas individually and then iteratively pass and develop them in rounds. It reduces dominance effects, increases idea diversity, and works well for distributed or quieter teams. Facilitation, timeboxing and participant mix influence outcomes.

✔

  • Increased idea volume through parallel individual work.
  • Reduced influence of dominant participants.
  • Well suited for distributed or quiet teams.

✖

  • Requires clear facilitation and structure.
  • May produce less spontaneous interaction.
  • Not all ideas are immediately contextualized.

  • Number of submitted ideas

    Measures volume of contributions per session and per participant.

  • Share of actionable ideas

    Percentage of ideas that can be tested or implemented quickly.

  • Participation rate

    Share of invited people who actively contribute.

Product team increases idea count

A product team replaced open brainstorming with brainwriting and doubled submitted ideas because quieter members contributed more.

Remote design sprint

During a remote design sprint a team used digital brainwriting to collect ideas asynchronously across time zones.

Cross-functional problem solving

In a strategy workshop brainwriting helped surface diverse perspectives equally and identify hidden assumptions.

1

Define objective and briefly state the problem.

2

Set participants and timeboxes.

3

Explain rules (written, anonymous/named, number of rounds).

4

First writing round: individual idea collection.

5

Further rounds: pass and extend ideas.

6

Cluster, evaluate and follow up.

⚠️ Technical debt & bottlenecks

  • Non-standardized templates hinder reuse.
  • No central idea repository causes knowledge loss.
  • Missing tool integrations hamper follow-up.
Participant countTime constraintsFacilitation skill
  • Using brainwriting as the sole validation instead of ideation.
  • Time pressure so high that only superficial ideas emerge.
  • No facilitation: rules are ignored and chaos ensues.
  • Excessive structure kills creative impulses.
  • Early evaluation reduces inventiveness.
  • Unclear documentation prevents traceability.
Facilitation experienceBasic knowledge of creativity techniquesAbility to synthesize and prioritize
Psychological safetyFacilitation capabilityAvailability of suitable facilitation tools
  • • Limited workshop duration
  • • Need for documented templates
  • • Accessibility for remote participants