By Issa Bass
 

Most project executions require a cross functional team effort because different creative ideas at different levels of management are needed in the definition and shaping of a project. These ideas are better generated through brainstorming sessions.

Brainstorming is a tool used at the initial steps of a project, it consists in encouraging a voluntary generation of a large volume of creative, new and not necessarily traditional ideas by all the participants. It is very beneficial because it helps prevent narrowing the scope of the issue being addressed to the limited vision of a small dominant group of managers

Since the participants come from different disciplines, the ideas that they bring forth are very unlikely to be uniform in structure and in quintessence so the synergy of gist that they yield needs to be organized for the purpose of the project. If the brainstorming session is unstructured, the participants can give any idea that comes to their minds but this might lead the session to stray away from its objectives.

A structured Brainstorming provides rules that make the collection of ideas better organized. A form of Brainstorming called Nominal Group Process (or Nominal Group Technique) is an effective way of gathering and organizing ideas. At the end of the Brainstorming, a matrix called Affinity Diagram helps arrange and make sense of the many ideas and suggestions that were generated.

Nominal Group Process

Nominal Group Process (or Technique) is a technique that provides a reflection group a framework for a non-threatening and constraint free face-to-face discussion where the participants aim at reaching an agreement on a given topic. The objective is to make it easy for every participant to freely express his or her opinion and make suggestions without any pressure and at the same time prevent a small group of more opinionated participants from taking over the debate.

The first step in the process will consist in designating a facilitator. His role will be to conduct the discussions and makes sure that the members fully understand the issues being discussed without letting himself take a major part in the generation of substantive ideas. He will have to give the chance to every participant to make a suggestion.

The suggestions can be made orally or in writing. Every participant is asked to give as many ideas a possible in response to a given question.

The facilitator writes down all the ideas on a board for all the participants to see, and then every one of them is discussed by the group in order to clarify some of the suggestions made before a list of priorities is discussed to determine their merit.

At the end of the discussions, the team assesses the priorities and agrees on the next step.

The advantages attached to such a process are that:

• A group of people of different horizons reach a consensus on a given issue
• A high volume of suggestion is made in a short period of time
• The ideas generated will usually go far beyond and will be way more creative and original than what a meeting of a group of similar minded managers who meet regularly would yield.
• it helps uncover tacit knowledge (knowledge that reside in the employees that has so far been untapped) of employees by eliminating psychological complexes and freeing repressed ideas.
• Gives a sense of belonging and motivates to all the participants to the endeavor

The disadvantages are:

• Because the participants come from different areas and of a company and therefore have a different background, the facilitator needs to be very competent and knowledgeable and flexible.
• The more vocal participants may end up having it their way.
• If there are too many participants, the meetings will end up being too long and hard to conduct.

Affinity Diagram

If the ideas generated by the participants to the brainstorming session are few (less than 15), it is easy to clarify, combine them, determine the most important suggestions and make a decision. But when the suggestions are too many it becomes difficult to even establish a relationship between them.

An Affinity Diagram or KJ method (named after its author Kawakita Jiro) is used to diffuse confusion after a brainstorm by organizing the multiple ideas generated during the session. It is a simple and cost effective method that consists in categorizing a large amount of ideas, data or suggestions into logical groupings according to their natural relatedness.

1. The first step in building the diagram is to sort the suggestions into groups based on a consensus from the members
2. Make up a header for the listings of the different categories
3. An affinity must exist between the items on the same list and if some ideas need to be on several list, let them be.

About the author
Issa Bass is the managing editor of SixSigmaFirst. He can be reached at issa@sixsigmafirst.com

Tell us what you think about this article. Send a note to the Editor.

www.manorhouseassociates.com