6-3-5 Brainwriting (or 635 Method, Method 635) is a group-structured brainstorming technique aimed at aiding innovation processes by stimulating creativity developed by Bernd Rohrbach who originally published it in a German sales magazine, the Absatzwirtschaft, in 1968.
Contents
In brief, it consists of 6 participants supervised by a moderator who are required to write down 3 ideas on a specific worksheet within 5 minutes, this is also the etymology of the methodology's name. The outcome after 6 rounds, during which participants swap their worksheets passing them on to the team member sitting at their right, is 108 ideas generated in 30 minutes. The technique is applied in various sectors but mainly in business, marketing, design, writing as well as everyday real life situations.
Introduction
6-3-5 Brainwriting is a particular form of brainstorming through the medium of graphics; in particular, it is classified under the intuitive and progressive methodologies as it involves driving inspiration from other members in a cyclical way. The grounding of such technique is the belief that the success of an idea generation process is determined by the degree of contribution and integration to each other's suggestions, and specifically it is meant to overcome the possible creativity barriers brought up by issues such as interpersonal conflicts, different cultural backgrounds and reasons of intellectual properties.
Procedure
Pros
One of the main advantages of using 6-3-5 brainwriting is that it is a very straightforward method and therefore is easy and quick to learn. In addition to this, no particular training for the supervisor is required.
Secondly, it valorises the possible different backgrounds of participants since it encourages sharing and exchanging knowledge. Differently than traditional brainstorming, it assures an active participation from all members and at the same time avoids issues of domination over introverts that are also likely to feel more free about expressing their own ideas instead of risking to have their potential inhibited by those who shout louder.
All ideas are recorded on the worksheet, this means that nobody has to be in charge of taking notes throughout the session and this adds a motivational factor since it is possible to keep track of the author of a particular idea.
Overall this leads to a gain of efficiency that might imply an economic benefit since by hiring 6 members 108 possible content ideas are generated.
Cons
Expressing ideas in a written form may lead to issues in clarity due to participants having trouble summarising their ideas or reading their colleagues' handwriting or graphical representations.
Stress due to time constraints might cause quality of ideas to decrease, and this might require some people time to become familiar with the methodology.
There is a risk of clash of similar ideas since there is no immediate group discussion which constitutes a loss of possible innovation.