What you need

• Book a specific date

• Get your team together for 20–30 minutes

• Have one of your teammates be a facilitator to mediate and lead

• Digital or analogue papers/Post-it Notes

Introduction

Our Ideation Cards has been proved to be a great tool for getting ideas when you use them at creative workshops, innovation processes or design sessions. It’s a simple but powerful mechanism: set the problem you are trying to solve, take a “what if” card and get ideas. This tool is very easy and flexible enough to use it in many different ways — you can even use it remotely.

In this tutorial, we’ll share with you some of the ways you can use them for working remotely. We will also try to cover some of the most typical scenarios (and even suggest some simple solutions too) when using the cards remotely, but feel free to adapt any of these ideas to yours.

How to use our Ideation Cards on a video call

This is the simplest way to use our creative prompts. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Skype, Zoom or any other video call software, all you need is someone with one of our Ideation Cards (no need of having one set per person). The dynamic can go as follows:

1. Set the goal of your session

   On the call, make sure everyone understands the problem you are trying to solve. We like to sum it up in a sentence so that everyone is on the same page.

2. Show or read a card out loud

   The person with the selected Ideation Cards should act as a facilitator for this session. The facilitator can take one random card (or make a selection) and read it out loud to everyone. As an alternative, you can show the card on the camera.

3. Get ideas

   In silence, everyone should take a couple of seconds to think of ideas related to the card. After 30–40 seconds has passed, ask everyone to share their ideas. The facilitator should take notes, encourage participation and give a recap of the ideas that’s been shared before taking a new card.

You can repeat these steps as many times as you want but we advise you to spend between 30–50 minutes for this dynamic session.

Pro-tips

• If your group is too large (bigger than 6 people), we advise you to split the team into two or three groups. Each team (while still on the video call) can talk on a separate chat (e.g.: on Slack) and one of the members can act as a representative to share the ideas with the big group.

• Set your cameras on. It’s more human to see faces instead of icons.

• Make sure everyone understands the instructions and the cards when you read them.

How to use our Ideation Cards with Google Docs

If you are looking for a simple and accessible way of making your remote workshop more interactive and structured, you can combine your video call with a Google Doc. Yes, you read right — with a simple Google Doc.

You’ll still need to set up the video call by following the steps on the previous exercise. The only difference is that instead of asking each participant to note down their ideas on a piece of paper or on their note-taking app, they’ll be noting their ideas on a shared Google Doc.

For the Google Doc, we advise you to use the following structure:

• Name of the file

  Name your session as you wish.

• Title

  Add the challenge you are trying to solve here so that it’s present during the session.

• Team members

  Add a list of each participant’s names

• Card #

  When you read a new card, you’ll notice that they all have numbers on them. Instead of having to type up the whole card, you can just specify the number of the card you have read. That way, you’ll have a reference to where all of the ideas came from.

Tell the participants to type up their ideas under “Card #”. Make sure to add a new “Card #” for each card you use.

At the end of the exercise, you can collectively vote for your favourite ideas with * or emojis 😉. Trust us, it will make your selection process faster.

Note: Remember to enable document access for everyone through link-sharing. If not, you’ll have to manually give permission to each participant.

How to use our Ideation Cards with Mural or Miro

If your team is used to managing software such as Mural or Miro, these could be great additions to your remote ideation session. These apps let you use digital post-its, notes and even graphs, so it makes it very easy to collectively and productively work from home.

When using our ideation tools with these apps, you only need to create a Post-it Note with the card numbers you read aloud through the video call and ask everyone to add their ideas next to it.

Pro-tips

• Structure the digital canvas in a way that you can add the crazier cards on top of the canvas, and add the most rational ones on the bottom. It can give you a great visual structure to understand if you’re trying to create more innovative ideas or more down-to-earth ones.

• There is no need to type up the whole card down on the digital Post-it Notes. If you feel that typing up only the card number won’t suffice, you can just type up the “what if” question. It’ll be much quicker.

How to use our Ideation Cards with Slack

We haven’t experimented with this one, but hey, maybe it’s possible too! You’ll never know what the future of work holds for us all in these uncertain times — so here goes nothing.

You can run a quick remote brainstorming session with Slack. Firstly, we advise you to create a special channel for it, then send a message on the main goal for the session so that it’s visible for everyone. Pin that message so it’s always at the top.

If you are combining this with a video call, which we advise you to do as well, please read and follow the instructions of the first exercise. The difference here is that the facilitator will add one message after each card is read aloud; that message should be the “what if” sentence that’s printed on the card. 

Afterwards, all participants should respond with their ideas through Threaded messaging. This way you’ll have a very structured way to go through all the concepts generated.

Note: You might not need a video call for this one but either way, the facilitator should always type up the “what if” sentence on the channel.

Let us know how your remote collaboration goes and happy work from home!

Curious to know about using our Ideation Cards with other remote work tools that aren’t mentioned here? Drop us a line here and we’ll you some ideas on how to use the best remote techniques!