Try Silence During Your Next Remote Brainstorm
Leadership tip of the week #128
adapted from HBR
Research shows that embracing silence during a brainstorm helps teams produce significantly more — and higher-quality — ideas. Silent brainstorming can be particularly useful in remote meetings.
So what does it look like in practice?
- Starting with the meeting invite, make sure everyone understands the goals of the brainstorming session.
- At the beginning of your meeting, share a working document (such as a Google Doc or use Teams ) with key questions that need to be answered.
- Encourage all participants to contribute to the document for 10 to 20 minutes without talking. During this time, attendees can actively ideate and respond to each other in the document.
- The leader can also participate, providing direction and asking attendees to elaborate on specific ideas as they’re being formed.
- Once the silent phase of the brainstorm is complete, you can begin a discussion if your group is relatively small. If the group is large, you can end the meeting, review the document, and follow up with an email that shares conclusions and next steps. Or, you might consider sending out a quick survey where participants can react or vote on options to move forward.
A different approach to working on ideas but one that creates the workshop capability from before lock down and stops Zoom overload.
This tip is adapted from “Break Up Your Big Virtual Meetings,” by Liana Kreamer and Steven G. Rogelberg
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