Brainstorming from a Distance: How Distributed Teams Collaborate

For many creative teams, a typical brainstorming session might mean a huddle around a whiteboard, or an impromptu back-and-forth over a coffee break. With remote work on the rise, the nature of group dynamics is changing and so must our collaboration methods.

We reached out to creative team leads to see how they are adapting to collaboration and brainstorming from a distance—still a necessity for any creative project. Some are WFH veterans with a well-developed workflow, others quickly adapting to leading remotely, but all are focused on connections and strong, clear communication. The creative leaders we spoke with shared insights into keeping their teams inspired, motivated, and on the same page. 

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Build the structure for success

Structure, clarity, and consistency are keystones of remote work days. Each creative leader we spoke to had a specific routine in place that anchored their weeks and days. 

For Vida Cornelious, Chief Creative Officer at experiential agency Fake Love, this takes the form of a daily block of time to hear from every team member. “Setting a daily 15 minute morning team video check-in is a simple way to keep everyone connected and accountable. Promoting open dialogue for team members to share concerns, challenges or successes is a way to give everyone an equal voice.”

“Setting a daily 15 minute morning team video check-in is a simple way to keep everyone connected and accountable.” – Vida Cornelious, Chief Creative Officer at Fake Love

Roanne Adams, who helms the team at RoAndCo studio as Chief Creative Director, adopts a similar daily agenda. “Every morning we have a standing meeting so that we all align on what we’re working on. This little check-in helps set the stage for the day ahead.” She has also found that structure is imperative even for casual brainstorming. “Creativity needs limitations. So I find that having a clear creative brief and an account manager in attendance really helps usher the process along.”

Even with everyone remote, there are still ways to get everyone on the same page—literally. For John Koenig, Creative Director at World Famous, it means picking up the phone. “Chatting on the phone with my colleagues while everyone’s working on the same document is my favorite way to edit a piece of writing. There’s a simplicity of focus there that I find creatively stimulating.”

Mike Treff, President of Code and Theory, has found that his approach is rooted in two tenets. “We keep coming back to two core strategies for effective communication: preparation and transparency.” In fact, remote work has been a boon for his team’s productivity. “In many ways, this has helped us progress faster and more effectively—being remote constantly forces prioritization of time, effort, and activities,” he explains. “We’ve found that people come to meetings more prepared, on time, and having done the prep work needed to maximize the efficacy of the shared time.” 

Use “psychological shortcuts” 

For creatives new to working from home, it can be a challenge to create sustained focus in a space that usually signals that it’s time to switch off from work. Even if you don’t have the means to set up a home office, you can use environmental tricks to signal to your brain that it’s time to clock in and shift gears.

For Koenig, that means creating a space that matches the work mindset. “As someone who works remotely 90% of the time, I found myself incorporating touchstones of the Seattle office into my workspace in Minneapolis—from music and snacks to my desktop wallpaper—to help cement my desk as a place where work feels natural. It’s a psychological shortcut to get myself into a certain mood.”

Protect the quiet moments

If your creative process typically thrives on ambient studio sounds or the buzz of a bustling cafe, it can be tough to embrace the silence of working from home. But this unexpected pause can be an ally. Take the time to understand your innate creative rhythm, and build in the time you need for your mind to spin free and wander.

“I have my most creative ideas when I sit in silence.” – Roanne Adams, Chief Creative Director at RoAndCo 

Cornelious’ advice is to lean into those lulls. “Make peace with that silence and use it wisely. Schedule time for your brain to wander into a few ‘what if’ moments. Similarly, schedule creative time when you know your mind is most open to new ideas. Protect the time you need to think, and better thinking will emerge because of it.”

Adams knows that her creative process needs moments of uninterrupted calm. “I have my most creative ideas when I sit in silence, so if I have time and I know there is a creative brainstorm coming up in the schedule, I might close my eyes and meditate for a few minutes beforehand to clear my other thoughts out and get centered.”

Be your own editor 

It’s easy to feel untethered if you rely on creative sparring with your team to produce work. And it is true that some of us are more physically isolated than before. While challenging, this shift also brings with it the chance to hone your self-editing skills, and develop an independence that can supercharge your creative instincts. 

“We have to become better self editors. Walk away from your ideas, and come back to them with fresh eyes. Be critical and objective.” Cornelious recommends. “And when it is time to collaborate with others, you will be more open to new perspectives and approaches.”

Make it social 

Ideas thrive when teams feel connected and comfortable enough to share what’s on their mind. When it comes time to voice those fleeting thoughts or sparks that have great potential, a welcoming environment is crucial to the creative process. For remote teams, building team camaraderie that creates a sense of community and receptiveness where the best ideas can take flight is all the more vital.  

Stephanie Yung, Design Director at Smart Design, considers that every meeting starts with a chance to set the mood and strike the right note. “One simple way to stay connected is by starting off meetings with a quick ‘How is everyone doing today?’ This thoughtful question helps relax everyone and lets us more easily move onto the topic at hand.” Similarly, Koenig acknowledges this unusual time and asserts “it’s all the more important to let collaborative sessions be looser, chattier, and more digressive.” 

Some managers have opted to schedule a pressure release into their team’s week, like John Robson, Technology Director at FuzzCo. “We have a recurring Friday meeting where the whole team gets together on a Hangout and attempts to play a game. It’s been a lot of fun!” His team is also newly bonding over other shared interests. “We’ve found that a lot of us are spending more time cooking lately, so we’ve opened up a Slack channel for recipes and food-selfies. Things like that have really gone a long way to keep the positive energy flowing.”

And for Adams, some much-needed physical release is on the calendar daily. “We have a scheduled ‘5 minutes of movement’ everyday where we all call in and dance together.”

Embrace familiarity to connect with your creative spark 

While remote work may present obstacles for the uninitiated, it’s also a chance to see possibilities in new circumstances. With no commute, a safe, familiar space, and stretches of time alone, you could explore limits of your creativity and dig into more complex thinking that you wouldn’t otherwise have had space for in an office.  

“What we’ve learned is that even though you’re remote, you can feel closer to people in some ways.” – Stephanie Yung, Design Director at Smart Design

Yung echoed this sentiment in her experience conducting remote research with prototypes and stimuli through Smart Design’s human-centered design process. “It’s not the first time participants have expressed they are more comfortable having personal conversations in the comfort of their own home versus a more formal research facility. The nuance is that they are in a safer environment and feel more free to share real feelings even more than through in-home ethnographies. What we’ve learned is that even though you’re remote, you can feel closer to people in some ways.”

Outside of your usual work environment, you have new visual influences to explore. “Be inspired by your space or the view outside the window.” Cornelious says. “And consider more honestly what aspects of your creative craft need work, and adjust. Learn a new skill, collaborate with someone you normally don’t work with.” Let yourself adapt and observe in ways you don’t typically give yourself space to explore.

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How to Lead Your Team Remotely

“These extraordinary times require more awareness and thoughtfulness around expectations,” remarked Deepa Subramanian, Chief Product & Digital Officer for the ACLU. Deepa is overseeing a team of 60 people as they’ve made the transition from working at the office to working remotely over the past few weeks. Communicating expectations has become even more paramount to her team’s success. No longer connected by physical space, but instead dialing into meetings and connecting throughout the day via chat, she reflected on being tasked with how to think more carefully about managing her team from afar as the boundaries between home and work blur. She’s not the only one. As managers navigate the new landscape of managing their teams from home, Deepa and several of her manager peers shared emerging best practices and what they are doing to provide their teams with clarity and support as they work remotely. 

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Support your team’s ability to be flexible.

With eight years experience working remotely, the CEO of Squared Away, Michelle Penczak, has managed a team of 100 people around the globe, from Japan to Germany and the US. Her team checks in daily and is on Slack during working hours, however that doesn’t mean her team is always available. With Michelle’s support, her team is able to block time throughout the day for personal tasks and caring for kids as needed. “Most of our staff are extremely driven perfectionists. Having kids at home and tasks to complete can increase anxiety. Reminding them that family comes first, no matter what, has given them the confidence to handle both without worrying about the professional side.” 

Even with the never-ending demands of work, Michelle encourages her team to have patience with themselves as they attempt to balance a long list of personal and professional demands. Knowing they will have time to take care of their personal lives allows them to show up more fully to work when they are on the clock. 

Be an example in helping your team set clear boundaries.

Even when working from home, our ability to be connected digitally can pressure us to believe we have to be constantly available. Deepa Subramanian, Chief Product & Digital Officer for the ACLU, has made it a priority to help her team of 60 set clear boundaries between on and off time. On a practical level, her approach has included: 

• Asking team members to mark their individual calendars with times they are available and unavailable
• Requesting team members more broadly share times they are consistently not available in team calendars and Slack channels
• Encouraging team members to honor each others’ availability when sending invites to meetings
• Having team members be clear in invites about what will happen if someone can’t attend a meeting (i.e. the organizer will email notes or follow up 1:1) 

Deepa noted that part of helping her team set clear boundaries means personally following the directives she’s given her team and requesting her managers do the same. “If members of my team hear leadership say, ‘Take time for yourselves,’ but then don’t see us doing that, how will they actually believe that is a true directive? Leaders need to clearly embody the healthy practices they are putting in place for the broader team to trust and consequently leverage them themselves.”

The practices Deepa has incorporated into her own workday include: 

• Setting up a pleasant workstation (switching where to break up the monotony) 
• Only post online once taking care of myself in the morning
• Respect a real lunch break and mid-day break (ironically, I never did this when I actually went into the office)
• Updating my Slack availability to indicate when I’ll be back online, which helps me feel less guilty 

Regularly assess your team’s professional well-being.

Brian Smith, a Design Director at FullStack Labs who has been working part-time remote for four years and full-time remote for four weeks asks for regular feedback from his close-knit team of five so he can gain insight on how internal processes are working and where he may need to make changes. In addition to daily and weekly check-ins, Brian asks his team to respond to a quick survey each month so he can gain insight into their professional well-being. The questions are rated on a 1-5 scale with room for comments. Here are examples of what he asks his team to respond to: 

• I feel like I know what is expected of me on a daily basis
• I feel like I know what is expected of me in my current role 
• I feel like I can continue to grow at FullStack Labs
• I feel like I can contribute to improving the way we work at FullStack Labs 
• I feel like my opinions are valued by the team

Based on his team’s responses, Brian has a better understanding of what his team members need from him, including where he can provide more clarity and support. It also prompts him to have follow-up calls with specific team members to address individual needs. This approach can scale with his team to help identify hiccups in the process and know which team members might need more 1:1 attention. 

Set realistic expectations for yourself and your team. 

“What we get done we get done,” said Mike Trozza, who co-leads a design and development team of 18 full-time staff for P&G’s Tide brand. Personally, Mike has worked from home often in the past, but has never worked remotely with his team as a whole until now. He had hoped to have more deep work time like he previously experienced while working from home, but that hasn’t been his reality. 

Now his days are chopped up because his team needs more interaction, and he’s okay with that. He’s changed his schedule to get up earlier for uninterrupted time before his team is online. His shift in expectations around productivity extends to his team as well. There’s always work to be done and it can be all-consuming, but he reminds his team that it’s also important to step away from work to stay connected to family and loved ones. He expects his team to get a reasonable amount of work done in the hours they are available and after that, it’s personal time. 

Similar goals, different approaches. 

Each of the managers I spoke with are navigating specific challenges depending on the size of their team, the time zones they’re spread across, the demands of their work, and other variables. However, each was optimistic about finding an approach that works well for their specific team and making changes to that approach as needed. As leaders, supporting a team’s flexibility, teaching by example, directly asking how you can support, and adjusting expectations to reality are all helpful in managing from afar to provide clarity for and support to a team. It will look different for every manager, yet despite the differing rhythms of our workdays, it’s clear from the managers I spoke to that the goals are similar: to help team members feel supported, cared for, and connected as they continue to do the same work, just now from home. 

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Loveis Wise: How Self-Work and Personal Memories Nourish Creativity

When I speak with the illustrator Loveis Wise over the phone, I hear birds chirping in their Los Angeles garden. I also hear the pitter-patter of the paws of Mellow, their pet Shiba Inu, on the grass. It sounds just like the worlds I see when I look at Loveis’ designs—floral-filled sanctuaries populated by beings taking care of one another.

Care, for Loveis, has become a creative philosophy of sorts: They often mine for inspiration childhood memories of being cared for, and their illustrations themselves embody care in their empowering depictions of intersectional identities, queer bodies, and self-loving individuals. Aptly, “nurture” served as the name and theme of Loveis’ first New Yorker cover, released two years ago when they were fresh out of art school at age 23 as an ode to nourishing, matriarchal communities.

Loveis’ joyful, celebratory approach can be seen on large and small scales, gracing their recent Black History Month mural for Google’s artist-in-residence program as well as a floral patterned bandana, designed in collaboration with Wolff Olins for Planned Parenthood. As with many creative people, Loveis pours their self into their work—a process that can often bring out the best in an illustrator, but also one that comes with its own challenges as work and life boundaries blur. Sat in their garden, Loveis shares the story of how taking care of themselves personally has led to a stronger creative outlook and working process.

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Q. Your illustrations have such a unique voice, in terms of the patterns, colors, textures, and forms. How did you arrive at your style?

A. By playing around with different ways to draw. I had a professor [at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts] that encouraged students to draw in the most uncomfortable ways—uncomfortable, but also still comfortable to our own hand, almost like how we would when we were kids. So that tuned me into how I innately draw. I also thought a lot about how different artists that I love interpreted figures, like Kerry James Marshall. My love of patterns comes from the picture books I read as a kid, like Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day and Eric Carle’s The Hungry Caterpillar. I took all of those little influences, mashed them together, and my style was born. 

The illustrator casts a wide net when looking for inspiration, drawing from spirituality, community and nature.

Q. What else inspires you, outside of art and illustration?

A. I’ve been learning more about spirituality, metaphysics, and playfulness, as well as nurturing my own community in various ways. That might mean making a plant medicine for a friend, cooking, or taking time to reconnect with my body.

 

Q. You often draw from personal memories to create work. How does that manifest?

A. I started using nostalgia in my work while I was doing a lot of self-work. I had a rough and traumatic childhood, and to be able to move through it, I tried to recover calm and beautiful moments where I truly felt free. Putting these little memories into my illustrations has helped me a lot. 

The artist’s second New Yorker cover echoes many of their signature themes of nature, community, and nostalgia.

You can see these memories in things like my first New Yorker cover, where I was inspired by my mom and the women in my family. I grew up in a very matriarchal family: Both of my grandmas grew food in the garden and took care of us. I brought memories of their nurturing and care into the cover.

“When you’re telling your own truth, it makes for the best pieces, because people will connect with them.”

For my second New Yorker cover, I remembered moments from my childhood watching a femme person taking care of another femme person. My grandmother owned a hair salon: I drew from my memories of women coming in, getting taken care of, their conversations, and the beauty of that interaction. I also drew from memories of my mom tending to me, doing my hair, and the safety of that.

 

Q. I’ve read you say that illustrators can sometimes be afraid of putting themselves into the work. Why do you think that is?

A. There’s often a pressure to be what people want you to be. Early on, I found myself trying to mimic what I thought people wanted me to be and how my work should look. Through doing therapy, I started to see myself as enough, and in tandem, I came to the realization that my stories are worthy of being told in my work. I started to feel much safer sharing personal parts of myself in commercial illustrations. When you’re telling your own truth, it makes for the best pieces, because people will connect with them. 

Loveis Wise at home with Mellow, their beloved Shiba Inu.

Q. What other realizations about your professional life have you made through self-work?

A. I used to overwhelm myself with a lot of projects, because I felt like I needed to take everything on at once. I found myself saying yes to everything, and thinking that if I said no, it was a bad mistake that I’d regret. We can all get ambitious in that way. 

The artist’s Google Doodle for Black History Month, in 2019 depicting Sojourner Truth.

Now, I’ll only take on two to three commissions a month, and I feel comfortable enough to say no. Maybe it’ll come back later again, who knows? I only take on the work that really speaks to me, and nine out of ten times, I hand the project over to a friend, or I recommend someone else for it. Saying no is a powerful thing: It’s all about having better boundaries with yourself.

“I only take on the work that really speaks to me.”

Designating certain hours, and certain times, to work has also been important. There was a time when I had no boundaries at all and I’d be overworking. I’d be so hard on myself when I thought I wasn’t spending enough time drawing. I now won’t ever work past 8pm. I won’t do that to myself. And I’m not hard on myself when I do need a break. 

 

Q. How do you split your time between personal projects and commissioned work, and what is the relationship between the two?

A. Right now, more than ever, I’ve been diving into what that question really means to me. For a long time, I was only working on commission-based work and I didn’t take the time—or make the time—to play. I stopped hearing that call for my own innate creativity. 

Wise has learned to balance personal work with commercial commissions in a way that best serves their innate creativity.

Now, I’ve now set up a strict routine to make time for personal work. I’m the sort of person that if I don’t create a plan, I won’t stick to it. So I wake up in the morning, take a shower, go for a walk, and then I designate an hour or two for making whatever comes up. Afterwards, when I’ve done whatever I really want to, I can focus the rest of the day on my commissioned gigs. And it’s so important to make this time, because you can bring the information that you learn about yourself while playing into your professional work. 

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