In my last blog, I talked about the Nominal Group Technique, a quick and painless way to guide your team through a brainstorming task.    Each team member gets a stack of Post It notes (or index cards or scraps of paper or whatever is available) and 5 or 10 minutes to silently and anonymously write down as many ideas as they can think of, with one idea per note card.  When the time is up, the meeting facilitator (i.e., the Project Manager – you) collects the artifacts, reads them all aloud, and, once all the ideas have been heard, asks the group to begin discussing them.

There are many benefits to this exercise:

  • Participants have time to organize their thoughts and are not influenced by ideas from others
  • Participants are less emotional when writing down their ideas
  • Less assertive team members are heard equally with more dominant members
  • Ideas are de-personalized because they are submitted anonymously

 Today I will give you some additional methods to use with the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), to maximize the many benefits of using this simple tool. 

Affinity Diagramming is a useful technique for organizing ideas that are generated using NGT.  After all of the ideas the team has generated have been read aloud, put the Post It notes or note cards on a table and ask the team to categorize them into related groups.  Some practitioners believe this exercise should be done silently, with team members arranging and rearranging note cards until everyone is satisfied that each idea is sorted into correct groupings.  Others believe it is acceptable for the team to discuss what they are doing.  You can make the best choice for your group based on your history with them and your understanding of their group dynamics. 

However you choose to do it, this allows ideas to be grouped into categories and then sub-categories, and gives your team a broad framework for their detailed discussion of the ideas they have generated.   

The Plus/Delta Technique is an approach for guiding a discussion about ideas that have been generated using NGT.  As the brainstorming session progresses, ideas will be analyzed and evaluated, to determine which ones will become part of an action plan, or left on a parking lot list, or discarded entirely.  A short list of ideas will be selected for detailed discussion.

During this part of the meeting, divergent opinions emerge and participants may become entrenched in the belief that an idea is either “good” or “bad”.  The Plus/Delta Technique is a straightforward means to make sure your team open-minded about the relative benefits and drawbacks of a particular idea. Simply go around the room and ask each participant to name a benefit (Plus) and a drawback (Delta) of the idea under discussion.  This forces each person to acknowledge both the merits and the flaws of an idea, and can move your group past a conversational deadlock.  

Brain Writing is a variation of NGT.   Instead of having each participant write down all the ideas they can think of in the allotted time, ask each participant to spend 1 or 2 minutes and write down three ideas. 

At the end of the time, each person passes their three ideas to the person on their right.  That person must contribute three ideas by either adding to the ideas that have been passed to them, or to create new ideas.  At the end of the time, each person passes all the cards in front of them, up to six cards, to the person on their right.   Post It Notes are really effective for this technique, because ideas can be stuck together and passed in a chain.  Continue passing the notes and either building on ideas or creating new ones for a few rounds, until the chain of ideas becomes unwieldy.  

When the exercise ends, have your team use Affinity Diagramming to organize the ideas.  This is a great tool to have the team collaborate without initial discussion, and can be effective at overcoming a variety of challenges with how a group interacts with each other.  Participants that don’t know each other well or have a history of competitive behavior may be able to collaborate more successfully using this technique. 

In my next blog I will talk about using Attribution Analysis as a team brainstorming technique.