How to Brainstorm with a Large Team

Have you ever been on a large team, say 20 members or more,
and the leadership put all of you into a room to brainstorm ideas?
If you’re like me, after participating in some of the idea-storming,
you backed up to a wall in order to observe the chaos.

And what chaos it was! Some people were spitting out ideas faster
than rain falls, others were saying, “We tried that already! It didn’t work!”
Some were saying, “People aren’t going to be happy with that idea!”
And still others were shouting, “That’s just not logical!”

It’s hard to get much quality brainstorming accomplished with such a
large team! So how do you, as a leader today, harness the strengths
of such a large team to get optimal results when you’re starting at
the idea stage for a new project?

This is one of the times that I like employing the Myers-Briggs
type indicator (MBTI) assessment tool. The MBTI’s results for a
large team can be utilized to great advantage at the early stages
of a project. Since a lot of people are somewhat familiar with the
results of the MBTI, I’ll give brief descriptions of where I’m going with this.

When you and your employees take the MBTI assessment, the result is a 4-letter code:

The first letter (E or I) indicates extravert or introvert.
The second letter (N or S) indicates intuitive or sensing.
The third letter (T or F) indicates thinking or feeling.
The fourth letter (J or P) indicates judging or perceiving.

When we’re trying to brainstorm ideas and evaluate them effectively with a
large team, we’ll look at peoples’ MBTI scores, but only at the second
and third letters.

From the second letter, we take all of the people who are N’s (intuitives),
and put them in a room to get lots and lots of ideas on the table. People
who are N’s are typically great at generating a lot of ideas in short amounts
of time. This is the first step for brainstorming with a large team. There is
no evaluating ideas at this time, only idea generation.

Next, from the third letter, take all of the people who are T’s (thinking),
put them in a room with the list of ideas generated by the N’s, and have
the T’s apply logic to all of the ideas that were brainstormed.
(Since T is the third letter, some of these people will have been in the
previous meeting, if their second letter is N.) This is the first step in
evaluating the ideas, and the list will be whittled down.

Next, from the second letter, get all of your S’s (sensing) in a room with
the “whittled down” list and have them apply facts to the ideas that
remain. They should ask, “Has someone tried this before? What happened?”
They will weed out more ideas.

For the final group, from the third letter, get the F’s (feeling) in a room
with the latest list. This group will review each idea and ask, “How will this
affect people?” They will get the list of ideas to become even smaller,
or will at least put the ideas in the order in which they recommend implementation.

This is a great approach for brainstorming with a large team! Everyone gets to
participate and everyone gets to use their strengths.

If you lead a large team and would like to use their individual strengths to
great advantage for your project in the brainstorming and evaluating cycle,
consider employing their MBTI results in this way. Leave chaotic brainstorming
sessions in the past!

(See my other article about brainstorming titled “Make Brainstorming Work for You,
Not Against You”, also available through EzineArticles.com)

Glory Borgeson is a business coach and consultant, and the president of
Borgeson Consulting, Inc. She specializes in helping small business owners
(of 500 employees or less) to increase their Entrepreneurial IQ, which
leads to increased profit and decreased stress. Whether an entrepreneur is at the top
of his game like any top athletes you can think of today, or a rookie just
starting his business, Glory works with the entire spectrum of entrepreneur.
Top athletes have a coach; why not you?

Click here for Borgeson Consulting, Inc.

This article was originally published in The Business Express, Borgeson’s
free monthly ezine. You may subscribe by clicking here:

Ezine

Tags: brainstorm, brainstorming, evaluate, evaluation, ideas, manage, managing, plan, planning, strategic, team

brainstorming

How to Brainstorm with a Large Team

Archives

Categories

Recent Posts