How to structure a hybrid brainstorming workshop

Brainstorming workshops are powerful tools for ideation, collaboration and innovation as a team and company. Pre-pandemic most brainstorming sessions were hosted in a conference room, using a whiteboard and several post-it notes. In 2019 most of us learned how to make due brainstorming in fully digital meetings. But how do you design a brainstorming workshop that fits your hybrid organisation?

At Svava we help our users adapt to the hybrid workplace by creating templates for several types of meetings and workshops. In this blog post, we share some insights and tips that we use internally at Svava and with our clients to increase the quality of hybrid brainstorming workshops.

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Five essential steps for designing a hybrid brainstorming workshop

First, Determine Your Needs and Narrow Down the Problem

Together with your key stakeholders, you should set the objective based on your specific needs. This part might sound obvious, but the more specific you can get the better. 

  1. Define the problem and the insights you have into it in as much detail as possible (For example; What challenges and opportunities are there to working remotely). 

  2. Now look at each participant’s definition of the problem or challenge and agree on one as a group.

  3. When you have defined the challenge, you can now look at what you need to solve (For example; we must have a better internet connection or we must include remote workers better).

  4. After this, it is time to agree upon the biggest/most important problem to solve, you can do this by conducting a vote. 

  5. Now you are ready to generate ideas on how to solve the problem you have agreed upon is the most important to solve! This is the fun part, unleash the creativity in your participants and find new solutions.

There is no lonely genius, invite a wide range of participants and perspectives

Your workshop and its' successful outcome is dependent upon the participants themselves. The right mix of participants, with a wide range of backgrounds and skillsets, will improve the results of the workshop. Remember to go for diversity. We recommend reading this article by Lee Fleming.


When members of a team are cut from the same cloth (they’re all marketing professionals, for instance), the average value of their innovations will be relatively high, while the variation around that average is low: That is, you don’t see many failures, but you don’t see many extraordinary breakthroughs either.
- Lee Fleming

After you’ve invited them to your workshop, it’s important to prime their participation, by explaining the workshop, its reason and the intended outcome. This will help them gain an intimate understanding and perform better during the event. As the workshop will be in a hybrid setting, it is important to ask your participants how they will attend. Are they joining in the conference room or calling in?


Select a template, or develop a framework for your workshop.

Developing a workshop is a lot of work and requires thinking through and planning out all of the various steps of a workshop. Svava has curated a Brainstorming template for you, that you can use off the shelf. This makes the preparation easy and saves you loads of time. 

If you are an experienced workshop facilitator, you can develop the agenda in the template to fit your specific workshop. Here are some steps and phases that you can use to level up your hybrid brainstorming workshop:

Phase 1: The first ideation session. Invite your participants to Svava, discuss the goals and framework for your brainstorming. Then start the Idea Jam activity in Svava, where your participants can add ideas individually and anonymously. This creates the space everyone needs to reflect upon their ideas first, avoiding participants unconsciously influencing each other based on hierarchy or personal conflicts.

Phase 2: Group duplicates and categorises similar ideas. Once the individual activity is finished, end the Idea Jam session, Svava now automatically brings all ideas together, allowing you and your participants to group them and clean out duplicates.

Phase 3: Evaluate ideas. All team members should now individually reflect on each idea. You can add anonymous voting here, finding out which ideas rank the highest for each category.

Phase 4: Second Idea Jam. You can either set up a new Idea Jam activity in the agenda, for finding out new ideas, inspired by the previous work, or you can revisit the previous Idea Jam and generate new ideas in a group setting.

Phase 5: Cleanup of revised ideas. Redo Phases 2 and 3.

Phase 6: Meet to discuss ideas, preferably in person, but otherwise in a digital set-up.


Adapt technology and setting for hybrid success

A hybrid meeting creates high demands on technology and hardware. In a digital meeting, all participants are equal by default, but when you go hybrid you must ensure that everyone hears, see and can participate no matter how they join. We have collected a few tips:

Your remote participants

These participants join more or less like they would during a fully remote meeting. Make sure there is enough time before the meeting to make sure they hear and see each other and the ones in the room. We recommend sharing hostmanship with one other person whose sole responsibility is to make sure the remote participants are included properly.

Your participants in the room

This is the tricky part! We recommend that everyone has a personal laptop with a camera on. This is because it makes everyone take up the same space on the screen. An alternative is to have one camera filming all participants, this is harder as some participants will be far away and make it harder to interact. For sound, you should invest in a conference microphone that can capture what is said in the room. Do not allow those in the room to have their own microphones on, this is how you create that loud feedback everyone hates.

Make sure to follow up and share results

Have you ever taken part in a meeting, shared ideas, discussed issues and made decisions. Only to never see any notes? You are not alone. By using a tool, like Svava, you save time by having the tool compile the result for you as well as having it instantly available when the meeting ends. 

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How to solve the top 3 hybrid meeting challenges

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5 common challenges with hybrid meetings – and how to solve them