IdeaTree

“We’ve got a situation”
Uh oh. Something has come up. Something with more variables and points of view and possible unforeseen outcomes than any one person can understand. What to do?

“Brainstorming is good. Let’s get everybody in a room with a pot of coffee and lock the door until we figure something out.”

It would seem obvious that assembling smart people, experts in a given subject, and asking them to apply their expertise to a problem would result in the best solution. Surprisingly, this is typically not the case. On the contrary, innovation tends to occur on the edges between clusters of expertise, in the hallways of a conference rather than in the plenary session.

As an example, let’s look at one group of people that have delivered in spades. Maybe we can figure out what they do that has made them successful.

Crazily, Wildly Diverse
Intellectual Ventures is a think tank founded by Nathan Myhrvold after leaving Microsoft, where he founded the research division. Intellectual Ventures brings together high achievers to create a train of thought and then follow it. So far, it sounds pretty typical.

But they are different in at least one important way: their groups are wildly, crazily diverse. A think session might include a physician, a physicist, a mechanical engineer, and a paleontologist together.

It’s been known for some time that having a variety of expertise, experience, and even ability increases the accuracy of group decisions. Seems that the members of a group who know little or nothing about a subject have a broader perspective and don’t know what “can’t be done”, while the experts have deep knowledge that grounds everything in reality. When there’s no politics involved, no attempts to influence one another, no polarization toward one influential point of view, the accuracy of such a group can out-perform the most experienced (and expensive) panel of experts. (Surowiecki 2004)

The results at Intellectual Ventures have been staggering. At the first invention session it was thought that half a dozen ideas would be considered a success. They came up with between fifty and a hundred. They’re filing five hundred patents a year, with a backlog of three thousand ideas. (Gladwell 2008)

The diversity evident at Intellectual Ventures is but one leg of a three-legged platform that supports many high-performing groups.

The Commonalities of High Performing Groups
An awful lot of research has been done on top performers. What used to be mysterious and a black art has largely been explained, effective techniques developed. But they’re hidden in academic journals. These techniques, which can be simple to implement, are largely unknown, unused, and even resisted (they seem too simple and often bypass the human ego) by business and government.

As an example, let’s look at brainstorming groups. The high-performing ones tend to have certain qualities. Three of these are (Paulus & Yang 2000):
• Independence of the players
• Low blocking. Participants do not need to strive to be heard.
• High diversity. Having individuals of differing expertise

You don’t have to leave these to chance. They have been the subject of numerous studies and can be enhanced through methods such as one I’ll describe called “brainwriting”.

Brainwriting
Brainwriting is simple. You write your ideas rather than speak them. The written ideas are passed among group members. Previous ideas are read before appending your own. Contributions are anonymous. (Anonymity prevents something called “premature consensus” (Paulus 2006), in which the group rushes too quickly together toward a solution while ignoring contradictory evidence, like sheep not wanting to break from the herd.)

Leaving aside the full explanation of why brainwriting works, there are two major problems that it very easily solves. The first is “psychological inhibition”, the niggling thoughts that gum up the works such as “I’m a newcomer”, or “if I speak up I’ll create work for myself”. The second is the bottleneck of one-at-a-time speaking.

The bottom line: it has been shown that just addressing these issues using brainwriting techniques can generate 40% more ideas than individuals brainstorming alone, and in the beginning, more is better (look for future articles on picking the best ideas out of the pile).

Disney knows that these principles work. They use very similar group process they call “storyboarding”.

The good news is that brainwriting can be done electronically over the internet, so the conversation can continue 24/7. It’s like having a big shared flip chart that you can add to, prune, and refine at any time. You can also combine a normal face-to-face meeting with a second channel of electronic brainwriting in which a growing network of ideas connects under the surface of what is apparently going on in the room, invisible to any passerby who might peek in. Maybe passing notes at the back of the room has its place.

The Future of Meetings
When a meeting or project group is made efficient, it starts to become less about “what I know you know” and more about “what can we create or decide”. And that’s exhilarating. Innovation, deep creativity, and “aha” moments may seem to be serendipitous accidents, but smart collaboration can make us accident prone.

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About The Author
Ron Newman, MS, MME, is the Founder of YourSongCode.com and IdeaTree.us. The latter provides cloud-based collaboration services utilizing visual mapping and document sharing, focusing on using human capital to solve complex problems in simple ways. He is an ex-IBMer, for 17 years an inveterate entrepreneur, and a lover of those who love ideas.

 

References
Gladwell, Malcom (2008), In The Air: Who Says Big Ideas Are Rare?, The New Yorker, May 12, 2008, p. 50.

Paulus & Yang (2000) Idea Generation in Groups: A Basis for Creativity in Organizations, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 82, Issue 1, May 2000, Pages 76-87.
see also:
Peter A. Heslin (2009), Better than brainstorming? Potential contextual boundary conditions to brainwriting for idea generation in organizations, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (2009), 82, 129–145.

Surowiecki, James (2004), The Wisdom of Crowds, why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations, Random House.

© 2010 by Ron Newman, All Rights Reserved