How to Brainstorm With a Whiteboard

Recently, the MyWhiteboards marketing team decided to brainstorm with a whiteboard. We named it the “Mega Brainstorming Session” on our Google calendar and set aside two hours one morning to come up with fresh new marketing ideas for the upcoming months and beyond. Upon entering our conference room, I was immediately informed by my colleague that I was doing it wrong, because I had brought with me an old list of previous ideas. True brainstorming, I learned, is an organic, disorganized, collaborative effort where the old adage there’s no stupid questions is actually true. Brainstorming does not involve bringing stale ideas to the mix, and it doesn’t involve any form of judgment. I closed my laptop, grabbed a dry erase marker, faced our enormous wood framed dry erase board, and began to write.

The OptiMA Guide to Brainstorming With a Whiteboard 

There are many different ways to brainstorm. Here are some general guidelines that we found helpful in our session and that anyone can use in the future!

Brainstorm With a Whiteboard

You can brainstorm effectively with sticky notes or flipchart paper, sure, but a whiteboard is truly the most inviting surface for this type of activity. Whiteboards can be erased quickly with little pause in thinking and writing and there’s no need to waste paper. And the bigger the whiteboard, the more ideas you can fit! We brainstormed on one of our extra tall 5′ x 10′ porcelain steel boards and nearly filled half the space with our ideas in just an hour. A whiteboard such as a full height wall, an extra tall board, or even a large portable unit is extremely well suited to this purpose.

Select a Topic

The first thing you need to do before beginning a brainstorming session is to set up your brainstorming space and come up with a central topic (the “why” of why you’re brainstorming.) In our case, we wanted to brainstorm a list of ways to increase customer engagement and brand recognition. Coming up with a topic before you start the brainstorming session can help keep the session focused in the direction that it needs to go. If you get off track, just return to your selected topic written at the top of your whiteboard!

Quantity Over Quality

When I first stood in front of that imposing blank surface, I had to fight the impulse to try and craft the best ideas ever, immediately. The goal of brainstorming should be to throw out as many ideas as you can in a specific amount of time. The ideas themselves can be horrible, and that’s okay! They don’t need to be groundbreaking. Once I stopped getting hung up on the fact that my ideas didn’t need to be good, I was able to produce a much larger quantity of them.

No Judgment Allowed

The idea of a brainstorm is exactly what it sound like – a flood of ideas and thoughts that you can write down and see somewhere. Because the goal of a brainstorm is to generate as many ideas as you can in an allotted amount of time, judging your ideas as bad or good isn’t helpful and slows down the process. It’s a natural human inclination to want to have the “best” idea, especially in front of colleagues. But a brainstorm is the time to not judge yourself for what you put on that whiteboard. It’s also important to note that if you are brainstorming in a group, judging others’ ideas is strictly off-limits as well.

Ask Questions

Asking questions rather than producing statements or writing full sentences allows your mind to expand beyond its typical limits. The key to coming up with breakthrough ideas is curiosity. Framing ideas as questions inspires and stimulates curiosity in a way that nothing else truly can. If you are collaborating in a group environment, asking questions also allows you to piggyback on the ideas of your friends or colleagues.