Effective Remote Brainstorming for Breakthrough Marketing
Remote brainstorming tips to facilitate team innovation and creativity when you’re working from home
Great marketing is a mix of creativity, science and business acumen. That’s what draws most of us to it - we get to use different parts of our minds and apply our range of talents to problem solving. Often this means working with diverse teams that have different strengths and skill sets. When it all comes together, you can create innovative marketing magic.
Fast forward to life under lockdown remote working and many marketing team leaders may despair that when they most need to work in collaboration with their diverse teams to develop innovative solutions that overcome the business effects of the crisis, that’s exactly what they cannot do. Or can they?
I have been working, collaborating and brainstorming remotely for so long that at first I didn’t understand all the distress and fuss that people are expressing on LinkedIn and Twitter about working from home. Surely it’s obvious, but then I remembered, it took me a while to navigate effective remote team leadership, especially when it comes to brainstorming. For most marketing and agency teams brainstorming is a regular part of working and not being able to hold brainstorming sessions hurts creativity and productivity.
Brainstorming can take many forms. Here’s a pretty comprehensive list of brainstorming types and techniques. In the main I think you can replicate them online or come up with workarounds to suit your team and the solutions you are trying to develop.
So how can you make remote team brainstorming successful?
Tip 1: Do it.
Don’t worry about making it perfect. Just do it well enough that your team will want to do it again.
Tip 2: Trial new tools beforehand to see how you like them.
Keep things simple at first. All you really need are a video calling system that everyone can log on to, screen share and a shared working document. If you really like whiteboards or flip boards then set one up in your home office (aka the kitchen) and position your computer so you can stand in front of it.
When I brainstorm online I use a video calling system that the whole team is used to (as a consultant I’ve gotten good at adapting to whichever systems my client companies use). Ditto for information capture. As long as the document can be shared on screen and enables real-time team access, that works for me. Google Docs or Slides is perfectly fine. If you like sticky notes then have the team IM their ideas or just pre-make boxes on Slides or PowerPoint for the team to populate.
Tip 3. Prepare.
Just like you would under normal circumstances, take the time to plan the brainstorm. What problem are you trying to solve? Which participants will be best placed to contribute? What is the minimum number you can get away with? (I am not a fan of large team brainstorming. To me it feels like a race to consensus or the lowest common denominator, as opposed to promoting breakout thinking.) What homework do they need to do to come ready to generate ideas?
Brainstorms that are called off the cuff and poorly organised are a total waste of time - face-to-face or virtual.
Tip 4. Assign roles beforehand.
This makes running brainstorms much smoother and seamless if everyone knows what they are meant to be doing. Who will create the pre-meeting materials? Who will identify and road test the remote brainstorming tools? Who will lead? Who will take notes in the shared document? Who will create the follow up plan and then follow it up?
Tip 5. Make the rules of online brainstorming clear.
This is not a status meeting that you can mute and get on with other work. Phones should be face down and out of reach. Everyone should be logged on to the call BEFORE the official meeting time. If you are using new tools everyone should have participated in a trial run.
Tip 6. Road test your remote brainstorming tools.
There is nothing worse than wasting the first 10-20 minutes of a meeting dealing with technical difficulties. It kills the mood and drains away all gumption and creativity. Don’t let it happen. Make sure you road test any tools one to two times beforehand to make sure that everything is in order. And keep it simple - refer to tip 2. The additional time investment will be well worth it if the you’ve had a successful first-of-many remote brainstorms!
Tip 7. Make sure Everyone is fully clothed!
And allow time for comfort breaks as you would in a face-to-face session. We have all watched the viral videos with horror and hysterical fits of laughter. Don’t let this be you!
Unexpected Benefits of Remote Brainstorming
Now, I’m not going to pretend that connecting over video call is the same as face-to-face when it comes to brainstorming but it can work really well and has some unexpected benefits that counterbalance the limitations.
More accurate content capture. In traditional face-to-face brainstorming sessions everything gets written on sticky notes, whiteboards and big pieces of paper. At the end someone needs to make sense of the mass of paper, sift through it, reconstruct it and decipher the chicken scratch handwriting. Oftentimes the post meeting outputs and recaps have gobbledygook gibberish interspersed with the helpful content. Important thoughts and concepts can get lost. If you capture everything in an online document the post meeting recap is much faster to create, more complete and more accurate.
Keep more of the great ideas. Lots of ideas get tossed around in a brainstorming session. Some may be great but not for the current situation. Still, they are worth keeping for a later date. In traditional brainstorming sessions, as the recap notes are created the content also gets edited down, many ideas get lost because they do not make it from the hardcopy to the recap notes distributed after the meeting. Capturing everything in a shared document reduces this risk because the interesting-but-not-for-now ideas are already captured in soft copy and accessible to everyone.
Easily create a searchable reference. Traditional brainstorm recap notes often get circulated by email but they don’t necessarily get saved in a searchable shared drive where they can be accessed, consulted and reused in the future. Starting with everything in a shared online environment gets you one step closer to a living repository of great ideas.
Once you’ve got the hang of online brainstorming you may want to explore more sophisticated tools built specifically for brainstorming. Here’s are two helpful lists from Zapier and Gitmind.
All this newness can be disconcerting but it can also be a great excuse to try new things that would have seemed too risky or outside normal working practices in ‘normal’ times. Why not take the opportunity to learn something new and trial a different way of brainstorming. You may find it that is productive and that you actually like it! Read more remote working tips.
Want to know more, get in touch: katherine@torrencemarketing.com