Technique

Alone Together brainstorming is a two-step process designed to maximize creativity and collaboration.

1. Individual Brainstorming Team members first brainstorm ideas independently. This phase allows each person to think freely without the influence of group dynamics or pressure. It encourages unique, diverse perspectives and prevents groupthink.
2. Collaborative Sharing After the individual brainstorming session, the team comes together to share their ideas. Each member presents their concepts, and the group can ask questions to foster shared understanding. This collaborative phase leverages the collective intelligence of the team, refining and building on the initial ideas to develop more robust solutions.

This method combines the benefits of individual ideation with the power of collective refinement, ensuring that a wide range of ideas are considered and improved upon through team collaboration.

Facilitation

• Clear instructions Clearly explain upfront the process and the goal of the brainstorming. If you use a whiteboard phrase the goal in a simple sentence visible for everyone.
• One idea per post-it Remind participants to write each idea readable on a separate post-it. It makes sense to show them an example where you write “SOMETHING” in block-style manner. This will speed up the process as people don’t have to guess what was written on a particular post-it.
• Time limit To ensure a focused session set a time limit. The usual time for brainstorming is around 2 minutes for individual work.
• Sharing Remind the participants that sharing is not about criticizing. Sharing is about understanding each other ideas and sometimes an idea that we would like to judge can trigger something completely new in someone else’s mind. Sharing is empathizing and understanding.
• Group and synthesize In order to have a second level of reflection on all collected ideas it makes sense to group the ideas with the participants. Here, the facilitator should take a step back and rather ask where a post-it belongs instead of doing the grouping in front of the group. It helps to use a separate post-it color for the initial ideas and the cluster names. (Sometimes, when there is time pressure in a workshop, you have to group it for the participants and ask for permission.)
• Prioritization If needed you can do a voting exercise to prioritize the created clusters. Example: You want to pick the three most relevant topics identified by this group of participants.
• Document output Document all ideas and discussions to not loose valuable insights.