Anonymous brainstorming is a variation of classic brainstorming. Due to the anonymous approach, the method is especially advantageous for heterogeneous group compositions.
Participants from different (technical) areas or different hierarchies of a company are given room for open, unfiltered statements without having to consider the opinions of other participants or react to superiors in a biased manner.
Classic brainstorming is the favorite method among all creative techniques and probably the most popular. Anonymous brainstorming is a variant of this and is particularly suitable for “uncomfortable” problems and radical challenges.
Due to the anonymous approach, the method is especially advantageous for heterogeneous group compositions.
Participants from different (specialist) areas or different hierarchies of a company are given room here for open, unfiltered statements without having to take into account the opinions of other participants or react in a biased manner to superiors.
Anonymous Brainstorming can be used in a wide variety of ways and in a great many situations, for example, to get started on a target, to generate ideas in advertising, for product development, as a way out of stalled creative meetings, to prepare for creative meetings, and as a foundation or precursor for other subsequent creativity techniques.
Anonymous brainstorming always works optimally for challenges, problem types, and issues of simple complexity. Especially also the good combination possibility with other techniques should be mentioned here.
Anonymous brainstorming also works well in virtual teams and remote meetings.
Within the meeting, participants formulate a large number of potential solutions to problems by making their own notes. The advantage here is that any criticism or evaluation of the ideas is initially omitted so as not to disrupt the creative idea generation process.
Even more important than a specific procedure are rules in anonymous brainstorming that must be followed under all circumstances, even after presenting one’s own suggestions:
1. no criticism of other contributions, ideas and proposed solutions.
2. no criticism at all
1. express even the impossible
2. take up ideas of others
3. displace bias
4. the bolder and more imaginative the better
5. no fear of embarrassment
Advantages
– Easy to use for everyone
– Time-shifted editing possible
– Prevents preselection by alpha animals/superiors
– Can be carried out independent of location and system
