| Beyond Brainstorming |
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Because few people know how to use it well or what to do with the outputs, it has a patchy reputation. Suppose fifty ideas are generated in a session, the recommended procedure is to filter out the poor ideas, discard them, and work on the select few. This fails to address the possibility that, in a well run session, every idea is part of the answer. There is much to discover about how our thinking processes can be prevented from blocking new thoughts and, conversely, how we can liberate the thinking of groups to produce outstanding results.
Here are some guidelines for simple brainstorming. Before you even begin, you need to select with care who to involve and how many. A dozen people gives a lot of diversity and good group dynamics. Get people who cover the whole area of concern – across departments or perhaps including customers and suppliers for instance. The objective is to get ideas flowing and people stimulating one another and building on ideas as they emerge, triggering yet more ideas. Before you start you may need to take time to refine the topic of enquiry as a badly framed question is unlikely to produce good results. Be sure to set up the best available circumstances – those in which people can feel relaxed, private, focused and creative. The ambience needs to be right and without interruptions during the session. There need to be the tools for the job – pens and flipcharts at the least. During the session people need to feel free to contribute in an un-threatening atmosphere where all contributions are equally valued. Don’t allow put-downs or mockery. You need to know how you will run the session – maybe with some preparatory exercises to get people into playful mode. Will you record people’s ideas or have them write their own? If you write down ideas on a flipchart it’s a good idea to write alternate ideas in different colours so that they stand out as independent. However, if you get them to write their own, you free yourself to facilitate and also avoid the temptation to edit, giving people more sense of ownership. People can independently write ideas on sticky notes which allows them to be posted and organised later. Many brainstorms allow people to write single words and for some purposes it may be acceptable. However, insisting on quality statements is likely to be far more productive – sloppy input may result in poor output. The objective is then to make progress without losing the richness of the input. The brainstorm has produced a rich collection of raw material for further thinking. Part of the process will be reading out the contributions with the opportunity to clarify, but then what? The classic filtering out or something different? If you have used sticky notes, ideas can be moved around and grouped in some way. This can be a differentiation, according to quality, novelty, priority, cost and so on. This is where we would advocate using Logovisual Thinking (LVT) as an alternative or complementary process. In terms of LVT we have completed the Focus and Gather stages of the five-stage process. Refer to the section on LVT and you will see that, instead of filtering ideas, you can actually structure them to arrive at a different order of output. Not only that but, if the participants themselves do the work, they will change their understanding of what they have created and have ownership of the outcomes. Regardless of the process you adopt, alternative maps can be photographed for the record and then reworked. Take care to include the participants in what happens subsequently.
We like to use Magnetic dry-wipe shapes on whiteboards but you can simply use regular or Post-it hexagons. Hexagonal shapes allow for clustering in non-linear patterns, and are also symbolic to various natural structures, the relevance of which is subtle but everything counts! Either way you need a number of surfaces to ‘frame’ and ‘re-frame’ ideas as they develop. If you have a dozen participants you may want to split into three groups. This enriches the variety and ensures everyone is able to contribute. Focus is the careful identification of the enquiry and, although this needs to be defined before you invite people to the session, it will need carefully vetting when the session begins. Ask people whether this is the right way to ask the question and be prepared to devote some time improving how it is formulated. Say 30 minutes Gather is ideally done by having everyone write their own responses to the question or topic, without conversation. Insist on full statements – subject, verb, object. Use of active verbs makes for more energy in the process. These statements are called MMs or Molecules of Meaning. Use bold pens and get people to print clearly, one idea to a note. Check for clarity and understanding. Say 30 minutes
Organise can be noisy and informal. The idea is to cluster the material according to mutual relevances that emerge from discussing the gathered material (this is meaning making, very different from categorising which is to force the material into pre-determined groupings) Often people stand around a board discussing the subtleties of arrangements. All material should be included – nothing rejected. Once clusters have been formed (usually less than 7 in a cluster) the meaning of each should be articulated as a ‘title’. This is a challenging meaning-making step which will allow the title to stand for the content. Say 60 minutes
Integrate is achieved by use of prioritising, or ordering into a ring composition, which gives structure and meaning to the various clusters developed in Organise. Where various sub-groups have worked in parallel their outputs can be shared then conflated so that there are somewhere between seven and fifteen items. The detail is left on the separate boards for reference and the titles copied onto new MMs for the integration.
All transformative processes have sequence and structure within them. The easiest way into the process is to have someone make a start by stringing together a sequence. Someone else can build on what has been begun and so on until all items are included. If the items are arranged in a circular pattern the narrative so formed could be begun at any point. Depending on whether you have an equal number of items, there may be one or two at the top or at the bottom.The ring forms a narrative that includes the substance of all the work so far and can be ‘read’ as a story everyone can relate to. There should be an aesthetic of symmetry and order within the arrangement and carefully reflecting on the pattern may well result in refinements being made. Add lines to show the structure – a ring for the sequence and horizontal lines (rungs) linking items across the ring. A vertical centre line joins the ‘latch’ at the top with the ‘ ‘turn’ (a critical or hazardous part of the process) at the bottom. Say 90 minutes Realise can take various forms which may not be what was expected. Outwardly it involves action. Inwardly it can be transformative for the people or their organisation, leading to a different way of being. The rungs should be allocated to actual persons who take responsibility for reconciling the items at each end. The vertical axis links beginning middle and end. To move from Integrate to Realise is an act of will – a decision that can change everything. May take long! Allow 30 minutes for closure within the event.
Provide technical inputs if relevant, take breaks, add playful interludes, have fun! This process has been used to facilitate individuals and groups up to 200 people in meeting challenges - from removing dysfunctions in their workplace to innovating global strategies for change. What do I do next? |
Brainstorming is a popular technique for accessing the diverse experience of a group. Since Alex Osborn 'invented' brainstorming seventy years ago it has had a good run. However, badly run brainstorming is all too common and few people ever experience its full potential. 
