Big ideas are NOT born in workshops - this is why

If you want to get good ideas out of a bunch of people, make sure they all get to sit and ponder in a corner before gathering for a brain storm or workshop, according to this interesting article Jena McGregor.

 

"Evidence has long shown that getting a group of people to think individually about solutions, and then combining their ideas, can be more productive than getting them to think as a group. Some people are afraid of introducing radical ideas in front of a group and don’t speak up; in other cases, the group is either too small or too big to be effective.

But according to a recently published study, the real problem may be that participants’ get stuck on each others’ ideas. On Monday, the British Psychological Society highlighted a recent study by Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith, two researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington and Texas A&M University. They asked undergraduate students to contribute ideas for improving Texas A&M, both individually and in collective groups. They shared the ideas on a computer, either in small chat groups or alone, but combined together after the fact. As expected, the “nominal” groups, or those made up of individual ideas that were later pulled together, outperformed the real chat groups, both with the number of ideas and the diversity of them.

Kohn and Smith believed the cause might be due to “cognitive fixation,” or the concept that, when exposed to group members’ ideas, people focused on those and blocked other types of ideas from taking hold. They experimented with this by manipulating the number of ideas participants saw in their chat windows, with some getting a few cues and others getting more. Their hypothesis was right: When exposed to many cues, the undergrads offered up less creative, diverse ideas. The numbers improved when the students were given a five-minute break during the exercise."

I´ve seen this happen in focus groups lots of times. A bunch of strangers sit down to discuss a topic, and at the end when you want to film them individually,they say the same thing! They use the same words, phrases, tone of voice. It´s like the group has come up with a united front and nobody can say something unique or honest anymore. Or... perhaps it´s still honest, maybe they have all convinced each other. Hypnotised each other into being like little North Korean children dancing for the leader in unizon.

Ideas get lost on the way. I´ve many times said something in a meeting without getting any response, to five minute later hear the boss say the exact same thing after which everyone go "yeah, wow, awesome". It´s not about the winning idea, it´s about the idea that wins. Different things. An idea can win because of the person who had it, of when it´s raised in the meeting, of whether people have eaten or not - and so on...

Leaders who look for really mindblowing big ideas know this. Reachers looking for truly behavioural changing insights know this. And we act on it too.