Brainstorms

Executive Summary

Getting a room full of people to think creatively together is harder than it looks. Whether in a workshop, classroom, or virtual session, facilitators face the same recurring challenges: the same voices dominate, quieter participants disengage, and ideas get lost before they can be built upon. Traditional approaches - sticky notes, open mic rounds, whiteboard sessions - fail to capture the full breadth of thinking in the room.

DiBL Brainstorms solve this. By giving every participant a real-time channel to contribute from their own device, Brainstorms generate richer, more diverse input - and then give facilitators powerful tools to visualise, filter, and focus that input into meaningful conversation.

This whitepaper explores the learning science behind collaborative idea generation, shows how DiBL Brainstorms compare to tools like Mentimeter, Wooclap, AhaSlides, and Kahoot, and provides a practical guide for running high-impact brainstorm sessions - from initial prompt design to post-session action planning.

The Challenge: Why Traditional Brainstorming Falls Short

Brainstorming has been a staple of facilitation since Alex Osborn popularised the concept in the 1950s. Yet decades of research show that traditional brainstorming - open verbal ideation in a group - consistently underperforms compared to structured alternatives. The reasons are well documented:

• Social inhibition - participants self-censor to avoid judgement or conflict
• Production blocking - only one person can speak at a time, so ideas are lost while waiting
• Anchoring bias - early ideas disproportionately shape the direction of the whole group
• HiPPO effect - the Highest Paid Person's Opinion dominates, suppressing diverse perspectives

Digital tools have partly addressed these problems - word clouds and quick polls make participation easier. But most tools stop there. They show you what people think, but give the facilitator little control over how to develop and deepen that thinking.

What's missing is the bridge between raw input and meaningful insight: the ability to visualise ideas collectively, surface outlier voices, prioritise collaboratively, and guide the conversation without losing momentum. That's exactly the gap DiBL Brainstorms are built to fill.

The Learning Science

Cooperative Learning

A landmark meta-analysis by Gillies (2016) reviewing over a century of research found that cooperative learning - where students or participants work toward shared goals - produces substantially higher outcomes than competitive or individualistic approaches, with effect sizes ranging from 0.58 to 0.70. Crucially, this holds across age groups, subject areas, and cultural contexts.

Cooperative structures are not simply about putting people in groups. Johnson and Johnson (1994) identified five key elements that make cooperation work: positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face interaction, interpersonal skills, and group processing. DiBL Brainstorms are designed to activate all five - every participant contributes, results are shared publicly, and the facilitator guides reflection and dialogue.

Collective Intelligence and Divergent Thinking

Research on collective intelligence (Woolley et al., 2010) shows that groups outperform even their brightest individual members when three conditions are met: equal participation, social sensitivity, and diversity of perspective. Traditional verbal brainstorming violates the first condition almost immediately. Simultaneous digital input - the foundation of DiBL Brainstorms - restores it.

Divergent thinking research (Guilford, 1967; Runco, 2014) consistently shows that the quantity of ideas generated is a strong predictor of quality. When participants contribute simultaneously rather than sequentially, the total idea pool grows dramatically - and so does the probability of genuinely novel thinking emerging.

Dialogic Teaching

Brainstorming is most powerful not as an end in itself, but as the opening move in a dialogic sequence. Research on dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2017; Mercer & Littleton, 2007) emphasises that learning deepens when ideas are made public, questioned, and built upon collaboratively. DiBL Brainstorms create a shared, visible artefact - the word cloud or response list - that becomes the text for exactly this kind of facilitated dialogue.

What DiBL Brainstorms Is

DiBL Brainstorms is a live, facilitated ideation tool that lets every participant contribute ideas simultaneously from their own device - phone, tablet, or laptop. Responses appear in real time as word clouds, sentence clouds, or ranked lists on a shared screen, giving the whole group an instant, collective view of the room's thinking.

Unlike simple polling tools, Brainstorms give facilitators active control over the experience: you can choose which responses to highlight, hide noise, prompt groups to prioritise, and shift seamlessly between plenary and individual views. The result is not just a data collection exercise - it's a structured thinking experience.

How DiBL Compares

A number of popular tools offer word clouds and open-text polling. Here's how DiBL Brainstorms compare to the most widely used alternatives - and where the difference matters most.

Tool	Strengths	Where DiBL goes further
Mentimeter	Strong word clouds and Q&A; clean presenter interface; widely used in education and corporate.	DiBL adds facilitator curation, group assignment, and the ability to embed brainstorms inside a larger facilitated learning journey - not just a standalone slide.
Wooclap	Good real-time audience interaction; integrates with PowerPoint; brainstorm/word cloud features available.	DiBL gives deeper facilitator control over response visibility and sequencing, and connects brainstorm outputs to branching activities and dilemmas in the same session.
AhaSlides	Affordable interactive slides with word clouds; AI slide generation; solid free tier.	DiBL is purpose-built for facilitated learning experiences, not presentation accompaniment. Brainstorms in DiBL are designed to feed into structured reflection, not just visualise sentiment.
Kahoot	Strong engagement through competition and gamification; widely recognised in education; recently added basic word cloud and brainstorm features.	Kahoot's brainstorm tools are designed for quick pulse-checks, not deep ideation. DiBL adds facilitator curation, group assignment, six structured brainstorm patterns, and the ability to connect outputs into dilemmas and simulations in the same session.

The core difference: most tools treat brainstorming as a moment - a slide you add to break up a presentation. DiBL treats it as a process - a structured, facilitated experience with a before, during, and after. It's the difference between collecting input and actually doing something with it.

In Practice: How to Run a DiBL Brainstorm Session

Before the Session

The quality of a brainstorm is largely determined before anyone opens their device. Start by defining a single, focused prompt - vague questions produce vague answers. "What do you think about our strategy?" generates noise. "What is the biggest barrier to implementing our new strategy?" generates insight.

• Use open-ended, concrete prompts that invite a specific type of thinking.
• Decide in advance whether you want free-text responses, rating/ranking, or both.
• If splitting into groups, assign roles or perspectives before the session starts to ensure diversity.
• Set up your DiBL session so the response visualisation is ready to share without lag.

During the Session

Launch the brainstorm and give participants 2-4 minutes of silent, simultaneous input time. Resist the urge to fill the silence - this is where the real thinking happens.

• Show the word cloud or response list once input time ends - this creates a shared moment of discovery.
• Invite brief reactions: "What surprises you? What's missing? What keeps coming up?"
• Use the highlight and hide tools to focus attention on the most interesting responses.
• If you used group prompts, compare outputs across groups - differences are often the richest conversation starters.
• Use an upvoting round to have the group prioritise: which 3 ideas deserve deeper exploration?

After the Session

The export function turns your brainstorm from a moment into a record. Use it to:

• Share a visual summary of the session with participants within 24 hours.
• Feed the top-voted ideas into your next planning cycle or decision-making process.
• Track how thinking evolves if you run brainstorms at multiple points in a programme.
• Use the raw data for reporting - showing stakeholders that decisions are grounded in participant input.

From Ideas to Action

The most common failure mode in brainstorming is not a lack of ideas - it's the gap between generating ideas and acting on them. Research on implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999) shows that groups are significantly more likely to follow through on ideas when they move immediately from generation to prioritisation to specific next steps.

DiBL Brainstorms support this transition in three ways:

• Prioritisation built in - upvoting and ranking tools let the group identify what matters most before the session ends.
• Exportable outputs - visual summaries and raw data can be used directly in planning documents, reports, and presentations.
• Continuity across sessions - run a follow-up brainstorm at the start of the next meeting to assess how thinking has developed.

A DiBL Brainstorm should always end with a visible answer to the question: "What are the 2-3 ideas we're taking forward from this session - and who owns them?" Building this moment into your facilitation plan transforms a brainstorm from a participation exercise into a decision-making tool.

The Six Brainstorm Templates

DiBL includes six ready-to-use brainstorm templates, each designed for a specific facilitation need. You can start any of them directly from the template library - no build time required - and adapt them as a starting point for your own session design.

All six templates are available in the DiBL template library. Sign up free at dibl.eu/sign-up, open the case builder, choose a template, write your prompt - and you're ready to run your first brainstorm in minutes.

Real-World Examples

Getting Started with DiBL Brainstorms

Creating your first DiBL Brainstorm takes less than five minutes. Sign up for a free account at dibl.eu, open the session editor, and choose from six ready-to-use brainstorm templates - each pre-configured for a specific facilitation need. Adapt the prompt and you're ready to go.

DiBL works on any device with a browser - no app downloads required for participants. They join via a session link or QR code, contribute their ideas, and see results appear in real time on the shared screen.

Learn more: dibl.eu/brainstorms

Key Takeaways

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Build It Yourself
Ready to create your own brainstorm in DiBL? Our builder guide walks you through the technical setup step by step - from creating your case to configuring Text Input blocks and Target IDs.

• → Whitepaper 7: Building Brainstorms - How to Build with DiBL Series

More in the Ways to Use DiBL Series

• Whitepaper 2: Dilemmas - Facilitated decision-making through branching scenarios
• Whitepaper 3: Presentations - Interactive, facilitator-led content delivery
• Whitepaper 4: Quiz & Mini-Games - Knowledge checks with scoring and gamification
• Whitepaper 5: Simulations - Multi-round scenarios with variables and consequences
• Whitepaper 6: Survey & Polls - Real-time data collection and evaluation