Transform your brainstorming sessions with draw.io

The same old routine

When working remotely across different locations and time zones, it’s hard to capture all the great ideas your team comes up with spur of the moment, let alone tackle and organize these ideas. What’s more, sitting around staring at a blank online whiteboard is not the most inspiring way to kick off a brainstorming session.

You not only want to be able to seamlessly jot down the ideas flowing from the team and record them with minimal barriers, you want to find novel ways to approach brainstorming that tap into your team’s creativity, and motivate and inspire them to contribute.

In this blogpost, we’ll look at how you can transform your brainstorming sessions with draw.io. Specifically, we’ll look at innovative ways to brainstorm using advanced methods, with templates for you to download and get started rightaway, and to give you and your team inspiration for your next brainstorming session.

Why brainstorm in draw.io?

Diagram and whiteboard with draw.io

With draw.io, you have the best of both worlds: you can use the diagram editor or board editor to visualize with your team. Both editors offer the same powerful draw.io features, but the board editor has a minimalist user interface and whiteboard look and feel, which is particularly useful for brainstorming sessions.

The blank board editor in draw.io

Diagram in your single source of truth: Confluence

Your brainstorming board sits directly within the documentation it’s linked to, all in your single source of truth: Confluence.

You don’t want a whiteboard flying around in virtual mid-air. It’s therefore useful to provide further context around your brainstorming session in the Confluence page:

• Why are you hosting a brainstorming session in the first place?
• What are your goals?
• What is the outcome you and your team would like to achieve by the end of the session?

These are questions to add to the page, to ensure rich and informative context is provided for anyone accessing the page and whiteboard, regardless of whether or not they were in the brainstorming session themselves.

A draw.io board embedded in a Confluence page

Real-time collaboration in Confluence Cloud

draw.io’s board editor allows you and your teams to collaborate on whiteboards in real time in Confluence Cloud. Simply share the link to the Confluence page containing the diagram with your team, click on the pencil icon to go into edit mode on the diagram, and get started.

2. Collaborate on the diagram with your colleagues in real time

Collaborative editing in Data Center

If you’re looking to collaborate on whiteboards in Data Center, we’ve also got you covered.

We’ve recently made huge improvements to collaborative editing draw.io for DC users. Find out more here, Collaborative editing in draw.io for Confluence Data Center and Cloud.

Collaborative editing in Data Center

Include custom links in your brainstorming session

When brainstorming as a team, you may want to link to further resources, to provide your teammates with additional context and resources so they can better understand the ideas you’ve jotted down, without cluttering up the diagram.

Add links to shapes that take diagram viewers to external webpages, Jira issues, other Confluence pages, and even to headings in your Confluence pages.

Add links to webpages in your diagram

Brainstorming templates to get you started

There are many different ways to brainstorm with draw.io. Here are a few of our ready-to-use templates designed to inspire innovative brainstorming methods, save you time, and give you a helping hand:

6-3-5 Brainwriting

1. Open Confluence.
2. Open draw.io (blank diagram).
3. Drag & drop your XML file into your blank drawing area.
4. Use it as a custom template if you like.

Brainwriting involves 6 participants, supervised by a moderator, who write down 3 ideas within 5 minutes. After 6 rounds, during which participants share their ideas with each other, you will end up with 108 ideas generated in 30 minutes.

The main advantage of this method is that teammates are inspired by one another, making it more effective than generating ideas in isolation. Instead of trying to come up with ideas from scratch, your team builds on each other’s suggestions in an iterative process.

Dynamic facilitation

1. Open Confluence.
2. Open draw.io (blank diagram).
3. Drag & drop your XML file into your blank drawing area.
4. Use it as a custom template if you like.

Dynamic facilitation is a way to promote small group discussion, enabling a team to face and solve issues, big or small, easy or complex.

Through a visual process, all ideas are heard and recorded in different categories. The method empowers participants by ensuring everyone gets an equal opportunity to present their views. This helps resolve roadblocks or disagreements by channeling the team’s energy from conflict into collaboration.

When participants step back and visually review the discussion, they are often in a better mindset and position to appreciate different perspectives, which in turn helps the session progress constructively.

Reverse brainstorming board

1. Open Confluence.
2. Open draw.io (blank diagram).
3. Drag & drop your XML file into your blank drawing area.
4. Use it as a custom template if you like.

Reverse brainstorming is a way to get to the crux of a problem first.

As the name suggests, this method turns brainstorming on its head. Unlike traditional brainstorming where the focus is on identifying solutions, this method focuses on the problems or obstacles faced, to then “flip” these and find the right solutions to those specific problems.

For example, “How can we ensure that our project deadlines are consistently missed?” From this prompt, the team come up with ideas to make this problem worse. This allows them to spot any root causes to flip this question on its head, and discover solutions in order to hit project deadlines consistently.

Making the most of it

Time is precious, especially for remote teams. By leveraging draw.io templates within your Confluence documentation, you can brainstorm much more effectively: capture every idea, engage every team member, and get the most out of every team session.

Want to dive deeper into the world of draw.io? Access our linktr.ee page to follow us on social media and learn how others use draw.io, as well as pick up some helpful tips and tricks.