5 Tips for a whiteboard brainstorm

Ask a Creative Director of an advertising agency where he / she will get the best ideas …

…That keeps your mind map organized on the whiteboard and therefore also in your head.

You probably recognize it: on your way home from your presentation the ideas suddenly start pouring in.

Brainstorm sessions are a kind of meeting in which an appeal is made to the creativity of the participants. The goal is often to find more inventive solutions that lie outside of „standard mindset“.

In this article, we give 5 tips to achieve more inventive solutions.

1 Creative furnishing drives creativity

Ask a Creative Director where he / she will get the best ideas and the answer will most likely be on a bike or on a walk. Out there, the senses are constantly fed with new stimuli as a source for new thought.

So you get more ideas in an environment where more creative stimuli are present. This can also be in an interior space. A surrounding that activates the brain to make new associations. Colors, shapes and images, among other things, contribute to this.

2 A large whiteboard gives creativity free rein.

Our motto is: „Don’t scale the size of your ideas to the size of your whiteboard“. In other words, don’t let the writing surface hinder your creativity. You need space to be able to associate, visualize and further develop good ways of thinking. The more space the better.

3 Make analog mindmaps

A whiteboard is ideal for mind mapping. Start with a central word or topic. From there make associations that you connect to the subject as „branches“. From those branches you make new branches. Use one word per branch and use as few sentences as possible. That keeps your mind map organized on the whiteboard and therefore also in your head. The advantage of a mind map on a whiteboard is that your brain processes the branches while writing.

4 start drawing

Replace words with drawings. Canadian professor Allan Paivio has researched working memory. He discovered that visual information is processed differently in memory than verbal communication. The written word „tree“ is stored a single time in your brain, namely verbally. An image of a tree however is stored twice by your brain: visually and verbally. SMake use of your drawing talents in your creative brainstorming!

5 Keep adding to your mindmap

You probably recognize it: on your way home from your presentation the ideas suddenly start pouring in. This has to do with your brain’s processing time and the ability to zoom out. Therefore, as a tip: Leave the outcome of a creative brainstorming session on the whiteboard. Add new ideas regularly in the following days.

Chameleon specializes in custom whiteboards with large writing surfaces. On this website you will find the options in terms of shape, color, materials and dimensions. Challenge us!