A great way to waste valuable time when working on a group project is to sit around bouncing half-made ideas off each other. Whether you’re in a group at work or in the classroom, brainstorming for a presentation topic or work improvement methods becomes a pain when no one forms a full thought.
Enter: The Brainstorm Collaboration Template. Five group members can put down their ideas, the pros and cons of the ideas, and then view and rate the other group member’s ideas.
How to use the Brainstorm Collaboration Template
To get started, download the free template and open it into Excel. The 6 tabs at the bottom indicate a homepage, along with a page for each member of the group. The homepage does not need to be touched until the end, as most of it is auto-populated from the other group pages.
First, rename the name tabs at the bottom to match with your group. Next, each member will open up their tab and enter in the first ten ideas they think of. Since this is a brainstorming activity and is meant to save time, don’t spend more than five or ten minutes thinking of ideas.
Next, flesh out your ideas by listing the pros and cons to each idea you’ve created. For example, if your idea for a group presentation in History was to talk about George Washington, a pro could be the abundance of information available about him. A con could be that he isn’t very interesting.
Once everyone has filled out their tabs, you’ll see each idea, pro, and con has been automatically added to the Brainstorming Summary tab on the left column. Next, each group member will use the right side column and, under where their name is listed, rank the other’s ideas on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being the best). Once everyone has ranked all the ideas, the “Total” column on the far right will display the total numbers earned from each idea. From here, you can quickly eliminate ideas that ranked low, and move forward with deciding on the ideas that were ranked the highest.
Tips for using the Brainstorm Collaboration Template
- If you cannot quickly think of pros for the idea listed, eliminate it.
- At the end, the dropdown arrow on the “Total” area can be selected and you can choose to arrange the ideas from highest ranking to lowest ranking for easier visibility.
- Don’t waste too much time asking about details of ideas when ranking them. Since this is only the brainstorming portion, nothing will be fully hashed out yet.
Download the Brainstorm Collaboration Template
Template courtesy of Microsoft
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