How to herd cats in a brainstorming session.
We believe in collaborative strategy development. As in one of our previous articles, strategies that are created in isolation and not shared are really not strategies at all. What I offer in this blog is one tool that is super effective at ensuring your strategic planning sessions are smooth and collaborative. We all know that in many group sessions, there are those that contribute more than others and uneven communication dampens creativity and innovation. Here is a way to overcome that risk.
This a brainstorming technique that feels a bit different to what you may have done in the past where people are contributing in an open forum with another person capturing contributions on sticky notes or on a digital whiteboard. This style of brainstorming is unstructured and its effectiveness is questionable depending on the behavioural styles of the participants. What I offer here is simple and effective but still needs facilitation to be effective.
This style of brainstorming is effective when you have some of the following variables:
- The group is large
- The group may be decentralised
- Previous communication sessions are dominated by one or a few individuals
- Some people may have social anxiety about contributing in a group
- Previous experience demonstrated a propensity for an argumentative style of discourse
- The group has a tendency to go off topic or get distracted
Instead of an open forum, participants engage in a process of capturing their thoughts individually. This is the process for using this brainstorming technique:
- Establish an agenda for the strategic planning session.
- This agenda includes a set number of defined questions and/or topics for consideration.
- Each person writes individually addressing one question or topic at a time.
- Instead of writing, providing each person with a digital whiteboard is super effective and encourages use of short text, images, pictures and diagrams.
- The writing time is usually limited to approximately five minutes. You may wish this time to be a bit longer, however shorter times can elicit some tension and anxiety that reduces the effectiveness of this technique.
- Once the writing time has expired, the facilitator summarises what has been contributed or you may choose to allow each person to present a summary of their contribution.
- If you are using a digital whiteboard app, the individual contributions can be summarised and consolidated into one whiteboard.
- Consider using your visual strategic plan as the tool to communicate your strategy with others in your business or to other stakeholders. Visual strategies are clearer and easier to understand than documents.
This general process is repeated for each question or topic. You can break it up with discussions and voting (if applicable), or you may choose to complete all questions and topics before engaging in discussions.
This is just one technique we use in our strategy sessions with clients.
If you are interested in learning more about this or other collaboration techniques, get in touch and I will be happy to help out. I can also recommend some different software tools to make this process so much easier and faster.
