Thinking is for individuals. Decisions are for groups.
7 Steps to avoiding groupthink in an Ideas Workshop
Generating tens of ideas in a short amount of time is easy if you set a timer for 10 minutes and say “Go!” But how do you sift through those ideas and turn them quickly into propositions while allowing everyone their own voice and avoiding the strongest voice taking over and steering the conversation?
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.
—Wikipedia’s entry on groupthink.
Brainstorming is the worst culprit for cultivating Groupthink when trying to generate ideas — stronger personalities can easily take over the discussion and we can find our lives less complicated if we allow ourselves to be taken down a path rather than skirmishing to communicate our own ideas.
Individual and group strengths
The secret to suppressing groupthink is to recognise when individual thinking is more valuable and when group participation is more valuable.
In the example of an Ideas Workshop, people working individually for 10 minutes will generate more ideas that are coherently formed than a group of people waiting in turn to get their ideas heard in a brainstorming exercise. But sifting through, voting on, and prioritising 30 ideas is better performed by a team.
Thinking is for individuals. Decisions are for groups.
We’ve been reading Sprint by Jake Knapp from the Google Ventures team. While the UX team at Ordnance Survey have not yet performed a full-on week-long sprint, we’ve run lots of workshops and are beginning to incorporate and test some fundamental ideas introduced in Sprint.
A practical workshop example
The goal of the workshop was to generate and consider as many ideas as possible, and form a few of the most promising ones into simple, written propositions that could be communicated to the rest of the business.
We started with a blank canvas, and ended with 4 propositions that contained a title, a description, benefits to the customer, and benefits to the business.
Here’s an outline of the process we used with notes on how we ran each stage, and why we chose a particular individual or group format for each stage. I’m deliberately omitting details of the ideas themselves as this post is about the process… mmmm, lovely process:
1. Generate ideas
Format: 10 minutes to generate as many ideas as possible. Each idea should be on a separate piece of paper.
Working: Individually
Five of us generated over 30 ideas in 10 minutes. Some with drawings on, but most were headlines of ideas. Working individually (and fast) allows uninterrupted thought on the problem, for you to remember all those times before that you’ve considered other options, and avoids being swayed by the big personalities in the room.
You don’t have to personally vet your ideas either, the group can do that later so just get writing.
2. Tell the rest of the group about your ideas
Format: Mix the ideas up on a table. Working from left to right, the person that came up with the idea takes a minute to explain it to everyone else.
Working: Individually (with questions from others)
Mixing the ideas up on a table and working from left-to right gives you a break from having to explain 5 ideas in a row and keeps things moving. A short explanation is enough, and other participants can ask for clarification so we all know what each of the 30 pieces of paper means.
There turned out to be similarities, ideas that had been heard before, and some completely new ideas that we’d never before discussed — which was interesting for a team of people that work very closely with each other every day.
3. Vote on the best ideas
Format: Everyone gets 4 votes and puts a dot on the ideas they think have legs.
Working: As a group (but not influenced by others)
We took 2 minutes to put our 4 dots on what we thought were the most promising ideas. No discussion here, and we all work at the same time. Here we’re trying to narrow down the field of ideas to consider in more detail without any one person having an overriding say in what direction we should go. There were 7 ideas that stood out after this round of voting (there’s more voting to come!).
A note about distraction and device-checking
At one point one of the team started checking their phone so we told them about the Sprint rule — “You can make calls and check emails whenever you like as long as you leave the room to do so.” It’s the first time we’ve introduced this rule into a workshop and it turns out to be a light-hearted but very effective rule. It turned out that everyone was happy to do all their device-checking during breaks and lunch and didn’t feel the need to leave the room at any other time.
4. Give each idea a title and group any other similar ideas under the titles
Format: Put the most-voted for ideas in a row, and group other similar ideas under them. Give each idea a clear title (the yellow post-its). Put the rest of the ideas aside.
Working: As a group
It’s much faster to collate ideas together as a group. It took us about 3 or 4 minutes and we checked and agreed with each other which ideas were related. Sometimes we had a card that seemed tightly related but we all agreed we should not group it because the idea was not strong enough, or didn’t add anything extra.
The columns of grouped ideas highlight where one person’s idea is similar to another’s (where we have a few cards under an idea heading) and ideas that were completely individual or new (where the idea has a single card associated with it).
We got a clear sense of where our thinking was similar, and what was interesting and new.
We put any other ideas aside and were left with seven idea titles that we all agreed on, under each of which were 1) a top card that we’d all voted was important and 2) any other ideas that were similar or related.
5. Decide which ideas we’ll flesh out in the afternoon
Format: Another round of voting. Everyone has 3 votes across the 7 core ideas. We’re voting to decide what we think are the most promising things to tackle in the afternoon.
Working: As a group
Again, ideas are for individuals and voting is for groups. We can only practically flesh out about 4 or 5 ideas in the afternoon, so by voting we get a clear priority order in which to expand each of these ideas that priority is clearly decided by the group.
If a single person decided on the priority it is easy to have members of the group disappointed that ideas they had faith in are not being considered. Having had the fair chance to vote alongside your peers allows one to get on with the job of deeper thinking without distraction.
We had 4 clear winners with 3 or more votes against them. We committed to expanding on them first and coming back to the others if we had time (we didn’t!).
Lunch!
6. Create a written proposition for each idea
Format: Everyone write a title, description, benefits for the customer, and benefits for the business for each of the 4 highest voted ideas. You have 40 minutes (10 mins per idea).
Working: As individuals
The aim here is to get several versions of the same idea to compare later. This is another example of where having uninterrupted thinking time generated a deeper, more coherent set of propositions which could then be compared, combined, discussed, and refined later as a group.
Also, having a time limit, a challenge, and a group of peers all working furiously around you keeps you going. You want to share your ideas, and you want to discuss them with the group.
The smell of sharpies after this was overwhelming so we went and had a coffee before coming back to...
7. Compare, combine, discuss, and refine
Format: Working through each idea in turn, each person reads out their proposition and the team then discuss and combine the best elements of the propositions into a final Title, description, benefits for the customer, benefits for the business. Have someone write this up in a format that can be shared (we used our company Wiki).
Working: As a group
By this time the smell of sharpies had ebbed away. We had discussed each of these ideas at length throughout the day so we were all on the same page about what each thing was. But we’d avoided talking too much about what the solution to the idea might look like. At this stage we’re considering example solutions, and refining each idea into an overview that can be taken to anyone, discussed, so they’d understand what it was you were proposing. And by anyone we mean not just a product owner, or director, or fellow UX designer, but someone we met on the street.
The benefit to this stage is our ability to combine ideas together, consider other people’s opinions of that we mean by the problem, audience, and benefits.
And there we have it
After a long, intensive day we’d whittled 30 ideas down to 4 that we all understood in great detail and could communicate easily.
We also had a list of backup ideas that we took photos of and put up on the wiki so others could see the things we’d ruled out.
We nicked this
Most of the framework of this workshop came from ideas in the book Sprint. We just mashed up some Sprint concepts and made them fit a 1 day Idea Generation Workshop. I hope we did the core Sprint ideas justice.
If you have used Sprint (or other) principles in workshops and sessions to keep them on-point, write them up and let me know. We’re going through a process of discovering and testing these ideas within the Ordnance Survey User Experience team and they’re working well for us. What’s your experience?
Oh, and press the little heart icon if you like this — cheers :)
