And The Writing On The Wall Activity: A Practical Guide
The And The Writing On The Wall Activity is basically a collaborative brainstorming exercise where you take a list of ideas and visually map out which ones have a solid foundation and which ones are running on fumes. The "wall" part refers to the physical or digital space where you post sticky notes, cards, or blocks for each concept. It's used in product development, marketing planning, and sometimes in software architecture reviews. Here's how I actually run it in my office. I start with a whiteboard or Miro board, write the core question in the middle, then team members spend 10 minutes silently writing their ideas on individual cards. The silence is important because if you let people talk during ideation, the loudest voice dominates and you lose diversity in the output. Once all the cards are posted, we group them by theme without voting yet. This clustering step takes about 15 minutes for a team of six to eight people.
Setting Up Your And The Writing On The Wall Activity
You need three things: a large flat surface, adhesive notes or digital equivalents, and a timer. The surface can be a literal whiteboard, a corkboard, or a tool like Miro, FigJam, or even Google Slides if you're remote. I prefer analog because the physical act of writing and sticking something down forces you to commit to an idea rather than endlessly tweaking it in a shared document where nobody owns anything. Write the central prompt clearly at the top. Something like "How do we reduce customer onboarding time?" not "Customer experience improvement." Specificity matters. A vague prompt gives you vague results. I've seen teams waste 45 minutes on a wall full of generic buzzwords because the original question was too broad. Set a 10-minute timer for the silent writing phase. Each person writes one idea per sticky note. If they have multiple thoughts on a single concept, combine them into one note. Separate notes for separate ideas. No exceptions. Then stick them on the wall in any order. Don't organize yet. Just post.
Processing the Output
After posting, step back and look at the wall. You'll notice clusters forming naturally. Move related notes together. Use different colors if your notes support that. I use blue for technical concerns, green for user-facing features, and yellow for infrastructure. Color coding helps spot patterns faster than reading every note individually. Once clustered, you vote. Each person gets three dot stickers or digital votes. They place them on the ideas they think are highest priority. This isn't democracy. It's a way to surface consensus without opening the floor to debate, which tends to derail the whole exercise. Voting takes about five minutes. After that, you have a ranked list of ideas with visual grouping. Here's the part most people skip: the written justification. For the top three voted ideas, each proposer writes a one-sentence explanation of why they think it works. Not a full business case. Just one sentence. This forces clarity and catches ideas that looked good on a sticky note but fall apart under scrutiny. I've deleted at least four "great ideas" this way because the writer couldn't articulate the mechanism in a single sentence.
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Common Pitfalls and How I Work Around Them
The biggest mistake is letting the manager speak first. If the person with the highest title voices an opinion before the wall is processed, everyone subconsciously aligns with that view. I counter this by having the facilitator read through all the notes aloud before anyone comments. No discussion. Just reading. This equalizes the room and makes the hierarchy irrelevant for about ten minutes. Another issue is the dominance of extroverts in the discussion phase. After voting, people naturally want to defend their ideas. Quiet team members get shut out. I solve this by using a written follow-up. Anyone who wants to add context does it in writing on a separate sheet, which gets added to the wall after the verbal discussion ends. This captures the nuanced thinking that gets lost in rapid-fire conversation. I ran into a specific problem last year with a client who tried this activity remotely using only a shared document instead of a visual wall. The output was a scattered list of paragraphs with no spatial relationship between ideas. Grouping became a manual tagging exercise that took twice as long as the actual ideation. The workaround was to switch to Miro with template cards that snap together. It cut the processing time from 90 minutes down to about 30.
When This Method Fails
And The Writing On The Wall Activity doesn't work well when the team lacks domain expertise. If you're brainstorming database architecture with people who only work in customer support, you'll get ideas that sound reasonable but are technically impossible. The method surfaces consensus, not competence. Pair this activity with a technical review session afterward if you're dealing with complex engineering problems. It also fails when the group is too large. More than ten people and the wall becomes unreadable. The clusters overlap, the voting becomes noisy, and the facilitator loses track of who said what. For larger organizations, I break the team into groups of six and run parallel walls, then merge the results. The merge step takes about 20 minutes but preserves the integrity of the exercise. If your organization has a culture where dissent is punished, this activity will produce uniformly safe, mediocre ideas. People self-censor when they know their manager will see the wall. In those environments, anonymize the submissions. Use digital tools that strip names from the sticky notes during the voting phase. The tradeoff is you lose the ability to follow up with individuals, but you gain honest input.
Tools and Resources
For physical walls, standard sticky notes work fine. I use 3x3 inch yellow notes for ideas and 2x2 inch blue notes for questions. Different sizes help distinguish between concepts and concerns at a glance. For digital alternatives, Miro offers a free tier that handles up to three boards. FigJam is similar but integrates better with Figma workflows. If you need something simpler, Google Slides with shape objects can work, though it lacks the drag-and-drop fluidity of dedicated tools. I maintain a template library in Miro with pre-built wall layouts for different activity types. The brainstorming template includes timer integration and color-coded note groups. It saves about 10 minutes of setup per session. You can find free versions on Miro's template gallery by searching "brainstorming wall" or "sticky note activity." The And The Writing On The Wall Activity remains one of the most reliable ways to surface team consensus without letting the loudest voice dominate. It's not perfect. It requires discipline during the silent writing phase and honest facilitation during processing. But when run correctly, it turns vague groupthink into structured, prioritized output in under an hour.
