by Patrick J. McKenna

Getting the best from your group's collective thinking.

Step 3: IDENTIFY THE PERSON WHO WILL ACT AS NOTE-TAKER.

Prepare to record ideas and appoint a recorder to do so. The facilitator and the note-taker should not be the same person. As the facilitator, you may choose to help the note-taker if the ideas are coming fast and furious, but you do not want to hold up the idea flow by trying to concentrate on what has just been said while also writing on the flipchart.

The recorder is responsible to write ideas rapidly on a (paper) flipchart; number each idea to provide for easily jumping back and forth from idea to idea without losing track of where you are; and number the flipcharts, and then tape completed pages to the wall keeping them in order. The recorder must also record every idea or comment. Even seemingly outrageous points should be noted. The recorder must never act as editor!

Now for something completely schoolmarmish: legibility. Though it may seem of little importance, scribing good notes is a critical part of your brainstorming process. Not only are they the only collective record of what happened, but the clarity of the note-taking contributes to the development of the thinking that takes place during the session.

STEP 4: WARM-UP.

If necessary familiarize your group with the procedures by engaging them in a practice exercise. This may be advisable if your group has not worked together before or the group has not brainstormed on a frequent basis.

As a warm up activity, you might start off with a brief artificial exercise. Ask them to: suggest thirty new ideas for a television program. Any topic that is fun and stimulating (but not work related) will get people into the right mood for creatively participating. After warming up for about 5 to 10 minutes, you should reintroduce your main topic for brainstorming.

STEP 5: BEGIN TO GENERATE IDEAS.

You might initially start by allowing your team members two minutes to think about and write down their ideas. Some may think fast, while others more slowly. Some may be overly influenced by the position, seniority or perceived expertise of other participants. Giving the group a few minutes to think individually can greatly enhance the number and quality of ideas generated.

Formally begin your session by asking for as many ideas and suggestions as possible. If the group seems hesitant, call on someone you know who is likely to respond positively, to offer the first idea.

In spite of agreeing to abide by the brainstorming rules, you must be watchful to quell anyone's natural tendency to want to comment, criticize or evaluate any of the ideas. At one particular firm where sarcasm is a cultural norm they adopted a football analogy to deal with partners that trampled on one another or on someone's new idea. During a football match, players who commit a foul are shown different color cards by the referee to indicate the seriousness of the offence. In this group they adopted a similar language in their brainstorming sessions. The first foul is a yellow card to indicate a warning. A further offence gets a second warning. Thereafter, any further offences or a particularly negative comment gets a red card signifying a penalty, which is usually of a monetary nature. It is done playfully, but there is a real serious intent behind it.

As facilitator, use short questions only for clarification - no lengthy discussions allowed. Discussion and questions should be unnecessary. Remind everyone that our goal is to go for quantity not quality - the more ideas the better.

Encourage people to write their ideas down. Something interesting occurs as we listen to our colleagues giving out their ideas. While we are listening, we are generating ideas of our own. If we don't write these ideas down, that are many times more likely to disappear than ever get shared with the group.

Psychologists have concluded that people can only remember a few thoughts at a time before the memory starts erasing the old data and replacing it with new input. Consequently without a place to store more ideas (like on a pad of paper) we either shut down in order to hold onto what's in our heads, or we lose one stored idea for every new one we add.

The facilitator's job is to keep the juices flowing. A some point you should start asking for weird ideas and any ideas which just spring to mind for no apparent reason. It can't hurt to remind your group of Oscar Wilde's admonition: an idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. Encourage your group to come up with ideas that are illegal, immoral, or would get them fired for being offered outside of this room. It helps if you can model some absurd thinking with a wild idea of your own.

Keep telling them how well they are doing when they come up with new ideas, especially when the idea is very radical. Thank them for contributing their idea. Be encouraging.

GENERATING IDEAS - VARIATION ONE:
FOR BRAINSTORMING SENSITIVE TOPICS

As a slight variation, give everyone a pad of twenty 8 x 14 cm cards. Ask your group to write down as many ideas as they can within five to ten minutes - each one on a separate card.

Have the group turn-in their cards to you. Shuffle the pack and give the cards out again. Ask each person to build at least two more ideas on the ones written on the cards they received.

Have the group turn-in their cards to you again. Shuffle the pack and give the cards out once more. Now have the people who received the cards read out the ideas contained on each card.

GENERATING IDEAS - VARIATION TWO:
DOUBLE-BARRELED BRAINSTORMING

This is a brainstorming variation that is particularly useful when you want to involve your team members in working through their ideas with respect to a new strategy or change that may impact your group's practice.

Left Barrel: Positive
1. Ideal Improvements to the plan 2. Feasible improvements to the plan

Right Barrel: Negative
1. Concerns and resistances to plan 2. Preventions to concerns and resistances

The positive barrel - First participants are given the opportunity to state their ideal improvements to how a strategy might be implemented in their area. Then they are asked to draft feasible, cost-effective versions of the ideas.

The negative barrel - Participants are asked to list why the strategy won't work - their concerns, resistances, and so forth. Then they are asked to recommend their preventative ideas.

Not only does this process improve the plan; it gives participants a chance to vent in a receptive environment. This more often than not turns pessimists into supporters of the strategy. The best improvements and most important preventatives should then be included into the strategic plan.

STEP 6: MANAGE THE SILENCE

You will find that the brainstorming session will go through phases of very rapid idea generation, and then through slow awkward times when no ideas are being created. Try to highlight this as natural.

In brainstorming, great ideas rarely come from a single flash of inspiration. The raw ideas need to be built and developed. This slow time is when you should return to the ideas listed on your flipchart pads. Pick an interesting one and put that to the group asking them to expand, modify or remodel it.

Play the What If Game. Have your group build upon their earlier ideas. This is a worthwhile exercise following the first burst of your group's brainstorming. What If is a series of provocative statements designed to challenge the group's current perspectives. For example:
- What if some parameter were increased four-fold?
- What if some factor was decreased in half?
- What if this same situation was being approached in a different profession, industry, or country?
- What if this same situation were being faced by a particular famous person?
- What if we could eliminate a portion of the problem?
- What if we could find a new way to deliver our service?
- What if we could substitute automation for labor-intensive effort?
- What if we could have clients do certain steps for themselves?
- What if we could eliminate the paper?
- What if we could deliver our services with greater speed?
- What if we could combine two related services?
- What if we could make dealing with us more enjoyable?
- What if we did nothing?
These questions are intended as deliberate acts of provocation.

If your group again falls silent, allow the silence to continue for a full two minutes. This maintains time pressure as well as giving an opportunity for the individual's mind to work. There are few people who have participated in brainstorming sessions who have not experienced brain-chain reaction - when minds are really warmed up, and a spark from one mind will light up a lot of others. Association of ideas comes in to play, so that an idea put into words stirs your imagination towards another idea, while at the same time it stimulates associative connections in other people's minds - often at a subconscious level.

Take a break. After a period your group will have exhausted their ideas for a while and will need a break. Depending on the time you have allocated to the session and depending on the number of ideas generated, you should ask them to take a break. If you are taking a mid-session break, get people to move about, chat with others and relax. Encourage them to look through the flipcharts of ideas. When the break is over ask people to sit in a different place, then ask for their further ideas.

Change the process. if you find things drying up. Divide the professionals into small groups around different flipchart pads and have them just brainstorm as a break-out team around the ideas on that pad. Then they can move on to the next grouping of flipcharts.

Introduce random words or pictures. Sometimes all it takes is an unusual image or headline to get your brain working. If you're in the middle of a brainstorming session and hit a point where no one has anything to say, rip out some pages from a variety of magazines and hand them around your working group. By forcing a connection (any connection) between the content on the page and the task that you're working on, you can generate an idea that will get you, and others, making more connections. Then, because your mind is engaged on the problem at hand, you'll naturally start ideating back to the task. The result? A possible solution triggered by absurdity or apparent dis-connections.

The overnight effect. It has been demonstrated that not more than 40 minutes should be allocated to having participants brainstorm any one particular topic. But we also know that sometimes great ideas occur to us after the formal session has ended. You could have people simply send in any ideas that occur to them.

One important reason for not trying to do all your brainstorming in a prolonged session is that you will miss out on the benefit of one of the critical success factors - the Overnight Effect. This is a simple yet powerful, psychological phenomenon that dramatically improves the quality of the output from any brainstorming process.

The ability of your group to generate great ideas will grow exponentially if you build at least one unstructured overnight into your session - so that your afternoon meeting flows over to the next morning. During that overnight period, people's minds always operate in a relaxed concentration mode. Bits of information come together and new mental connections are formed.

All of us have experienced the overnight effect usually without realizing it. We have gone to bed thinking about a problem and presto, in the morning shower a great solution dawns on us. Thus you should always start the session on the following morning by asking group members for their overnight thoughts. I've seen some of the best ideas come forth from those morning debriefings.

STEP 7: HELP PEOPLE MAKE THEIR IDEAS ACTIONABLE

You must be vigilant in ensuring that the ideas expressed are specific, doable, and can be implemented. Sounds easy, but it's not. In my experience, this is the most difficult part of the brainstorming process. We are naturally prone to expressing concepts or goals, and often find it difficult to transform those concepts into actions.

For example, a couple of common concept you might here include: I think that in our group we should always make a point of visiting our clients at their place of business to learn more about them. Or; we should improve communications.

As concepts, these are good ones. The only small hurdle is how? How will we ensure that everyone does this? How will we know that it is happening?

As the facilitator, you must always ask yourself, as these ideas surface: Is this proposed idea specific, tangible and quantitative enough (or is it merely a goal, concept, or objective)? For example, could some member of our group delegate this idea to a junior for implementation such that the junior would know exactly what initial action should be taken?

It also helps to think in terms of the tangible outcome (or deliverable) that will be presented at the next meeting to evidence the execution of this idea. Will this involve doing some research (a report); developing a policy, procedure, checklist or template; or taking some specific action that can be shown to have occurred?

Where ideas do not measure up to these criteria, you might want to gently encourage more specifics, without discussion. For example, you might say to the individual:

Janice, that idea would no doubt be very helpful to you and the group. Could you expand upon it to help us determine how we could ensure that everyone in our group was doing this consistently and how we would know that it was happening.

Take a moment to explore with Janice (asking other group members to contribute) how you could do this. By gently probing for more specifics, you may likely elicit something like:

Well, we could develop a wall-chart that would display a list of our top twenty clients down the vertical column and the members of our group along the horizontal. We could then initiate a system whereby each of us took responsibility to visit one client over the next quarter and note on the chart the date that client was visited and submit a one-paragraph report to the group on our findings.

Or; I guess one of the tangible things we could do to improve our communications, is to start a weekly internal newsletter. Now you have something specific. The group will be able to assess for itself, at any point, how far along with this action plan they have progressed. Have the top twenty clients been identified? Has the wall-chart been developed? Has a visitation plan been drafted? Have client visits been made and reports submitted? The facilitator's job is to ensure that he or she has helped the group generate a good list of very specific, tangible, quantitative and implementable ideas for moving toward their objectives.

Is this basic? Yes! Does it work? Yes! Do all groups do it? No! (Does yours?)

STEP 8: ANALYZE YOUR IDEAS

You should now have a large number of ideas scattered about on sequentially numbered flipchart pages. Technically, your brainstorming session is now over and the analysis process must begin.

If you should intend to end your group's session at this point, you will want to transcribe the notes on these flip charts for distribution to your group members. Upon transcribing these notes, you should do so in exactly the same page format as they were originally recorded. When you distribute your group's work back to the individual members for further brainstorming, analysis, or implementation, you will find it very helpful to have the notes in a format that reminds them of how your brainstorming session progressed.

If you are going to proceed to the analysis stage, the very first thing that you should do as a group is to remove any duplicative ideas and also combine any ideas which are really saying the same thing.

You might then begin your analysis, by having your group brainstorm your criteria for evaluating your various ideas. Label a new flipchart with: A good idea would have to have the following characteristics .... Your criteria might include characteristics like greatest potential for positively impacting the practice group's profitability; most attractive to our existing clients; easiest and fastest to implement; and other such factors.

You may have already determined your criteria before beginning your brainstorming session, and if so, you should disclose your criteria to the group. Ask them if your criteria makes sense or if they can see anything you have missed.

Once having developed your list of criteria, you will want to prioritize them. Ideally you may want to determine the two most important factors. Now depending on the number of ideas that have been generated, you have a couple of optional ways of approaching the analysis stage.

• If you have 50 ideas or less:

On an easel pad, draw a 2 x 2 matrix. The vertical axis could be labeled Actionable with easy at the bottom and hard at the top. The horizontal axis should be labeled ROI with low at the left and high at the right.

(You can experiment with other terms for the axis. Actionable might be changed to speed or effort or cost. ROI might be changed to excitement or value or potential.)

Have your group agree that you're going to use this matrix just to do a rough cut evaluation of each idea. This is not the time for a lengthy debate on every idea; so as rapidly as possible, put the ideas on the quadrant in a way that reflects the general agreement of the group.

If there are too many ideas to put on the chart, have everyone pick their favorite idea and put them up. Identify those ideas with the highest level of excitement and take those ideas into the next level of planning.

• If you have more than 50 ideas:

If you have a particularly lengthy list of ideas, have your group work through them and quickly arrange them into color-coded categories:

- Green: Definitely will work and can be implemented immediately.

- Yellow: Will possibly work or may require further analysis to decide if it will work.

- Red: Needs much more investigating. May work in the future.

When you have the lists you should plan to implement the Green ideas and to investigate the Yellow ones. Don't throw out the Red ideas. Just let them percolate with the group for some further thinking.

Finally, once you have your short list selected of the best ideas for your group to focus on implementing, you can take it one further step. I once worked with one team who, after a rather productive brainstorming and analysis session, devoted the last few minutes of the afternoon to reverse-brainstorming their best ideas. That is, they spent that time thinking through together in how many ways can this idea fail?

Sound like overkill? This group didn't think so and their results reinforced their taking the extra step.

©2002 Patrick J. McKenna, Edge International