Thinkfully’s Webapp is founded on the fundamental principles of how the brain works best. Unlike mindmaps or similar tools, it encourages you to get your thoughts down in a non-hierarchical way, freeing you up to decide what the main or important ideas are only once you’ve externalised them; relieving you of the burden of needing to know upfront how you expect ideas may relate and interconnect. The webapp allows you to play around with ideas, move them around, sort and re-sort to organise your thinking as it happens, which is important to allow your ideas to breath and breed more easily.

Importantly, the webapp includes a SHUFFLE feature to encourage the cross pollination between existing ideas. In the same way that David Bowie’s song writing process used the ‘cut up’ method by randomising existing snippets of content and text to generate new meanings from the rearranged pieces as a way to ignite his imagination and spark just the right unexpected combination of ideas to inspire a song, the webapp's SHUFFLE feature mixes up your existing ideas to spark fresh connections. Also, the best idea generation rarely happens in a single brainstorming session. Studies show that incubating ideas substantially increases our likelihood of solving a problem. Therefore, the webapp also includes a unique PLAYBACK feature designed to help you actively reflect on your thoughts, an important aspect of incubating ideas effectively.

Get started

• Frame the question: Set yourself a short question that you want to individually brainstorm around. This gives the brain the focus it needs, more so than giving it a general topic to consider. Ideally frame it as a ‘How to…’ type of question as this invites multiple, possible answers. Write the question out at the top of your canvas.

• First thoughts: Decide on an initial short period of time to brainstorm as many ideas to answer your question as you can (recommend between 10-15mins, but it depends on what time you have available).

• Idea generation: Over the course of the next few days, hold your question in the back of your mind and then whenever you have a possible additional answer to your question, write it down. Each time you write down a new thought, have a quick scan back over your earlier ideas. See if it prompts for any further ideas and if so, add them in.

• Fresh connections: The first day in which you haven’t had any new answers or ideas in relation to your question it’s time to look for new connections from your existing ideas – use the SHUFFLE feature to randomly reorder your existing ideas. See if the simple act of moving your ideas around generates any further thoughts. If so, write them down. You can re-shuffle as many times as you like.

• Take stock: Once your ideas have come to a pause and shuffling isn’t revealing any new sparks, it’s time to take stock and incubate. Use drag and drop to move hexagons around on the canvas, so you group together those ideas which are similar and keep apart those ideas that are different. There is no right or wrong way to group your hexagons, go with what feels right for you. Colour code your groups to help see themes emerge more clearly. Now you’re ready to incubate.

• Incubate: Use the PLAYBACK feature to watch how your ideas have unfolded over time. See if this helps you to reflect on your existing ideas in a different way. If so, write them down. Return to your canvas, however briefly several times to review and to keep the question in mind.

• Conclude: Depending on the nature of your question, you move on from them fairly rapidly (e.g. How to build in learnings from previous projects into the next one?", "How to get the most out of an upcoming event?" ) and others may be bigger more complex questions (e.g. “How to live your best life?”,“How to optimise my career?”), which always remain relevant. Either way, use the GEM highlighting feature to pull out the most important and meaningful points to take from your personal brainstorming either at the point you wish to conclude or at relevant intervals, which can often coincide with points of change.