Getting a group of people together to collectively think about a new challenge or opportunity has always been one of the most effective ways to generate new ideas – the starting point for any innovation. But with a new national lockdown kicking in and working from home becoming the norm rather than the exception, businesses must rethink how they effectively tap into the creativity of their teams.
Being able to run brainstorm sessions virtually, using Zoom, Teams or any other platform, is a new skill that people and businesses must develop. Everyone is now fairly comfortable using these platforms for routine meetings, but brainstorms and innovation sessions are different. The remoteness of the participants can make inspiring people, maintaining energy and sparking ideas of each other more difficult than when you’re all physically together.
But with careful planning and preparation, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t turn your next Zoom brainstorm into a success. To help, here’s some tips to get you started:
Be realistic about how long you expect people to be productive in the virtual brainstorm. Running a business review meeting all day on Zoom is probably OK as most people won’t need to be on point for the whole session. But in an innovation brainstorm you’re aiming for maximum interaction, energy and creativity, and this can’t be maintained all day.
Depending on content and what you’re expecting people to do, the maximum time you can reasonably expect people to be effective in a brainstorm session is 3 hours – and that’s only if you are sharing lots of content and most people will have long periods when they are just required to watch or listen. If you are looking for people to contribute thoughts and ideas throughout the session, then 2 hours is the recommended maximum time.
And don’t put pressure on yourself and your team to crack everything in one long session. Usually, it’s far more effective to run a series of shorter sessions to get the most out of everyone’s time when they’re in the brainstorms.
If you’re on Zoom then you’ll already be using a technology to see and talk to everyone – but don’t stop there. In a brainstorm session, nothing encourages people to participate and share their thoughts more than seeing their ideas being taken seriously and documented for all to see. In the ‘old way’ this would have been done with flip-charts and post-it notes, but these are of little use when everyone is in different places.
There are now a number of online collaboration tools that can act as the perfect tech partner for Zoom allowing everyone to capture ideas and collaborate in one place, in real-time. Many of these tools also have templates to use as the basis of your session to help give it some structure and to help with getting the creativity flowing. Here’s a few that we like at Propeller HQ….
You can also use Google Docs and anything else where everyone can see and use the same workspace at the same time.
One other benefit to this new way of collaborating is that it allows you to collect and store the outputs from brainstorm sessions digitally, which is far easier than trying to decipher a big pile of post-it notes!
If your business has a good innovation culture, then you will most likely have rules about people not being on their phone or email during a brainstorm, making sure they are completely committed to the session. This is easy to enforce when you’re all sitting in the same room, but much more difficult on Zoom where people can be looking at anything they like whilst appearing to be completely engaged in the meeting!
At one point, Zoom did introduce an ‘attendee attention tracking’ tool, but this was unsurprisingly removed due to privacy concerns. Instead, try and make your session as interactive as possible – ask question and get people’s thoughts regularly in the session so they realise they may get caught out unless they are paying attention.
If that fails, then you could always resort to using the classic school teacher line to name and shame… ‘perhaps you would you like to share what’s so interesting with group’?
Not having your video or microphone on effectively means that you don’t want your colleagues to see or hear you doing other things during the meeting. So, if you want everyone contributing then you must insist they are both ON – no excuses.
These platforms have video so people can see you, and the only reason to be on Mute is if there’s a lot of background noise. So, before the brainstorm make sure you’ve made your team aware of the importance of the session and that being somewhere where they can comfortably have their mic on as much possible is important too.
Like most things in your working life, preparation is key. Your actual Zoom innovation session is only going to be 2-3 hours long, so it’s essential to get participants to prepare ahead of the meeting. Send out pre-reads to get them up to date with the knowledge they need. Get them to do exercises relevant to the session ahead of time, like buy a competitor product, interview a customer, talk to an expert…. whatever you think would add value to your session. Use as much time beforehand to do off-line work so that you can maximise the short time you spend on Zoom.
Innovation on Zoom is not better or worse than face-to-face – it’s just different, and has pros as well as cons. Just recognise what these are and plan for them. Once you’ve developed the skills, you’ll find that innovation becomes more efficient and also much more cost-effective as people won’t have to travel, use physical resources or hire a venue. So win win!