Established in the late 1960s by Bernd Rohrbach, a German marketing professional, is a brainstorming method that relies on—you guessed it—writing. You allot a certain amount of quiet time, during which participants work independently to write down their ideas before sharing them with the group.

There are a variety of different brainwriting techniques you can use to limit time, choose participants, and build upon ideas together (and we’ll spell some out a little later). But they all rely on the basic premise of quietly jotting down ideas alone, rather than shouting them out in the rapid-fire format that most brainstorming sessions are known for.