Silent Brainstorming

Reflecting on yesterday's Agile and Beyond session by Winnipeg Agilist: Silent Brainstorming author Steve Rogalsky entitled "The Silence of Agile - changing the way you engage your team," I left with a plan to try silent brainstorming with my team next week.

What is it?

Silent brainstorming follows these basic steps:

1. Prompt - The Prompt step starts with a topic or challenge you want to solve, just like traditional brainstorming.

2. Gather - Instead of ideas being given verbally and recorded by a facilitator, participants record their ideas independently on Post It notes.

3. Share - When the pace of new ideas start to slow, participants take turns sharing out loud, then placing their Post It notes in the middle of the table or on a whiteboard.

4. Group - After all ideas have been shared, participants silently arrange the notes into conceptually similar groups. This practice is commonly known as Affinity Mapping. After the groups are formed, they are given a name and a group number.

5. Vote - To decide which ideas to take action upon, each participant is given a set number of votes. Votes are recorded in silence then tallied.

6. Discuss and Decide - The highest vote count ideas are discussed, then the team decides which ones to act upon.

What's wrong with traditional methods?

This sounds simple enough, but you may be asking "Why is silent brainstorming is better than just asking everyone to yell out ideas like we always do?"

The first reason has to do with the fear of failure, or saying a "bad" idea. Even though the ground rules of brainstorming imply that any idea is good and should not be judged, many are uncomfortable with being vulnerable. What if my boss or senior team member thinks I don't know what I'm doing? What if I have an idea that's not fully baked? Even if there is good trust within a team, sometimes the sheer number of participants rules out the possibility of conducting an interactive, verbal brainstorming session. Our session had roughly 50 people, yet when Steve asked us to initially brainstorm about what we knew about brainstorming, at most 5 people gave ideas. We were all engaged, yet only 10% actually gave answers. When using silent brainstorming, you are guaranteed 100% participation and there tends to be much less concern about saying something dumb or duplicating another response.

Steve referenced decades of scientific research including this University of Texas and Texas A&M study on Collaborative Fixation. The studies show that people are easily influenced by what they hear or see and tend to have less unique ideas when brainstorming is done as a group than when done independently.

For example, what do you think of if you are asked to clear your mind, then instructed NOT to think of a Pink Elephant? Most people have a hard time not picturing the elephant.

How about when you see the following:

EAT SO_P

Did you fill in the blank and see EAT SOUP as most people do?

The science conclusively indicates that for the most diverse, and greatest number of ideas, brainstorming should be done independently.

Qualifying the Results

Usually our goal is to not just generate a lot of ideas, but to assess, evaluate, and select the most promising ideas. The Discuss and Decide step is where collaboration shines and where you should encourage healthy debate. Debate typically spurs a deeper thought process and ultimately better decisions.

What's Next?

To conclude, science suggests that brainstorming works best when a silent step is used to gather ideas, followed by group discussion. This sounded like a great manner to conduct our team retrospectives!

How would you use Silent Brainstorming?

 

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