[compute] Re: [Sigia-l] "Team work" not what's cracked up to be?

[Ziya Oz]

tOM Trottier:

> If your "brainstorming" converges to a vanilla "solution", that's not
> brainstorming. 

So you are saying that there's no unsuccessful brainstorming?

> Even with a homogenous group, you should end up with a whole bunch of wildly
> divergent mostly impractical ideas which shed new light on the problem and its
> environment. 

Homogenous groups, almost by definition, don't tend to generate wildly
divergent ideas. And I'm not sure why one would try to extract "mostly
impractical" ideas from such a group either.
 
> If people are shy or invested, change the value system from "most practical"
> to "most ridiculous" to get everyone imagining.

If brainstorming is not a therapy session, encouraging participants to
generate "most ridiculous" ideas serves what purpose?

> Give candies or halloween kisses for each idea which is wilder than the one
> before.

Other than raising triglycerides, what would this do?

> Introduce randomness with randow words from a thesaurus or dictionary, eg,
> "How does "aardvark" relate to "handling customer complaints" when you get
> stuck.

Brainstorming is a means to an end: solution of a problem. While enhancing
interaction, communication, participation, etc within a group is worthwhile,
in the end, the point is to find relevant, effective, imaginative and,
hopefully, competitively advantageous solutions. Otherwise it's very easy to
get sidetracked.

Brainstorming is akin to what an actor does with his voice and body
exercises, getting into character before the curtain goes up. But we care
about what he delivers on the stage, not what goes on behind the curtain.

Groupthink is NOT the result of not having enough impractical, ridiculous or
wild ideas but, despite all that, it's gravitating towards solutions that
are perceived to be comfortable, conventional, risk-averse, etc. It's that
gravitational force and the desire to be part of the team that impedes
out-of-the box thinking.

----
Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem