# Brainstorm

A brainstorm collects ideas for one question. Everyone writes on their own first, then votes without seeing anyone else's votes, so the first or loudest ideas don't sway the rest. Start one from [Run a Brainstorm](https://decidenext.app/brainstorm/setup) on the homepage. You get a manager key, as with a retro board, and invite people with personal links or one join link.

## Two templates

### Prompt + Ideas

One Ideas column, or one column per sub-prompt. Ask a question such as “How might we cut onboarding time?”, collect answers, and vote for the best ones. Without sub-prompts, votes per person is the whole budget.

### Reverse brainstorming

Two columns: Ways this could fail and Flip it into ideas. List what could go wrong first, then turn each failure into an idea that prevents it. Each person gets the votes-per-person budget in each column, so the vote also shows which risks matter most.

## Sub-prompts

A Prompt + Ideas session can look at its question from 2 to 5 angles. Add sub-prompts on the setup page, each up to 100 characters. For example:

-   Prompt: “How might we cut onboarding time?”
-   Sub-prompts: “What slows new joiners down in week one?”, “What should day one look like?” and “What docs are missing?”

Each sub-prompt becomes its own column. Everyone writes and votes under each one in the same Write, Vote and Results phases, and votes per person apply to each sub-prompt. Sub-prompts are set when you create the session. When you export ideas from a session with more than one column, each idea is tagged with its column, so you can filter the prioritization table by sub-prompt.

## Three phases

You move the session from the phase stepper on the Board tab. You can go back as well as forward: ideas and votes are always kept. Participants' pages pick up a new phase within a few seconds.

1.  Write. Everyone adds ideas. Nobody can vote yet.
2.  Vote. Everyone sees all ideas, each person in their own shuffled order, and votes. Vote counts stay hidden, and no new ideas can be added. People can vote for their own ideas.
3.  Results. Ideas are ranked by votes, with counts. The board is read only.

As the manager you always see every idea with live vote counts, and you can merge duplicate ideas in any phase: votes move to the merged idea, and someone who voted for both gets one vote back.

## Silent writing

With silent writing on (the default), each person sees only their own ideas during Write, so nobody copies or anchors on someone else's first answer. Turn it off from the Board tab during Write and everyone sees ideas as they are written. In Reverse brainstorming, turn it off once the failure list is done, so everyone can flip each other's ideas.

## Countdown

Start a countdown of 1 to 60 minutes from the Board tab to timebox a phase. Everyone sees the same time left, whatever their device clock says. At zero it shows “Time's up” and nothing else happens: you decide when to move on. Moving to another phase clears the countdown.

## After the vote

On the Results tab, select the ideas worth pursuing and export them to a new or existing prioritization table, then score them with the method you prefer. See [Exporting results](https://decidenext.app/docs/exporting) and, to automate a session, the [API](https://decidenext.app/docs/api#brainstorm).