If you are like most people charged with running a meeting, you find the same group dynamics are in play meeting after meeting after meeting.  You have someone who won’t talk and another who won’t stop talking and everyone else falls somewhere in the middle. 

Dr. Paul Paulus at the University of Texas at Arlington has studied and written about group task performance and creativity.  He has determined that groups are less productive than individuals, if left to their own devices. 

Reasons for this “production loss” are many and include social loafing, the phenomenon of people making less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone and free riding, the phenomenon of participating without actually contributing anything, (“Great idea, Bob!”). 

Social Interaction Anxiety is the term used for what is happening to your brilliant technical resource when he becomes tongue-tied and inept when asked to participate in a group brainstorming exercise, even though he can toss out brilliant ideas for hours when he is alone in your office.  He is afraid of having his ideas judged and evaluated by a group. 

Other challenges are simply inherent to working in a group: it’s hard to listen to everyone else’s ideas while thinking of your own.  Someone trying to capture the ideas as they are tossed out caused the conversation to slow down.  There are often different power levels represented in the group, and some people may feel intimidated.

However, if a skilled facilitator intervenes (that’s you, Project Manager!), groups can be every bit as productive as individuals when working on creative tasks. 

The simplest way to overcome many of the drawbacks of trying to brainstorm as a team is the Nominal Group Technique (NGT).  This is so simple you have been doing it for years; you just didn’t know it had a name!  In its simplest form, NGT involves handing everyone in your group a stack of Post It notes and giving them 5 or 10 minutes to silently and anonymously write down as many ideas as they can think of, with one idea per Post It.  When the time is up, you collect the Post It Notes, read them all aloud, and, once all the ideas have been heard, ask the group to begin discussing them.

Now, can something this simple really be effective?  Yes, it can.  First, the real or perceived barriers felt by low power members of the group or by sufferers of Social Interaction Anxiety are removed, when ideas are generated anonymously.  Outbreaks of Social Loafing and Free Riding are restrained because everyone is responsible for generating their own Post It notes.   And there is no loss of enthusiasm while a scribe laboriously writes down each idea, because they are already documented by each individual.

Use the ideas on the Post Its as the basis for your “guided” brainstorming session, and you may just get better results.  In my next blog, I’ll talk about additional techniques for using the output of the Nominal Group Technique to get even more out of your team’s brainstorming efforts.