29 June 2023
It never ceases to amaze me: you’ve got six, nine or even fifteen people who have sat down together with the intention of finding solutions to a problem. No matter whether it’s a development, production or organizational problem, it’s an approach doomed to inefficiency in every case. We may have learned the necessity of giving a meeting a nice-sounding slogan, a stated objective and perhaps even an agenda, but do the people involved prepare for it in a targeted manner? This is a rather rare positive exception.
Particularly in organizations that have been infected by the meeting bug, there is no chance for the participants to prepare for the meeting or workshop. This is because they spend the whole week shuffling from one meeting to the next, leaving no time for such “minor” considerations.
If we really want smart solutions, creative approaches and a plan for an appropriate course of action in the shortest possible time, then good preparation is an absolute must. Another bonus would be that both the number of meetings and their duration would be significantly reduced. But that is not the main point here.
What we usually call “brainstorming” takes place in contexts that are no different from the everyday practice of looking for solutions in the company of the same people we messed up with in the first place.
Can we expect anything positive to come out of that?
No, we can’t.
Image: AdobeStock alotofpeople
In practice, this means that the customary brainstorming session only brings up what everyone already has in their heads and knows anyway, and that combining these thoughts merely regenerates old chestnuts.
We have to engage in diffuse thinking in order to subsequently meet and discuss the ideas that have emerged. Then we may actually be able to synthesize solutions from this discussion that nobody would have come up with on their own. But we humans can only create the raw material from personal research.
We cannot group-think.
It pays to be very consistent here: a workshop to determine a solution, an ideal procedure? Yes, of course, but only with intensive individual preparation.
If the management team proceed in this way, they won’t need a meeting that extends to three or four hours; one hour generally suffices, because preparation of the necessary materials has been allocated among the participants beforehand. This is the key to true effectiveness, with real thinking power and the chance to identify new and original approaches, provided that the meeting is conducted with a professional dialogue of argument and counter-argument and the individual participants are not intent in imposing their point of view or pet solution on the others, but instead want to find the best solution through shared knowledge.
So, as you can see, we can discuss things together but we cannot think together. Furthermore, identifying viable solutions is not possible without proper preparation. What do you think? Are you a fan of brainstorming in a group setting? What are your experiences with it?
Matthias Kolbusa
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