The TechPar Group Grey Team Process

“GREY HAIR AND GREY MATTER GENERATE INNOVATIVE IDEAS”

Generating new and useful ideas

Brainstorming is a useful and popular tool used to develop creative solutions to a problem.

It is particularly helpful in breaking out of stale, established patterns of thinking to develop new ways of looking at things. This can be used to develop new opportunities, to improve a service offering, or when existing approaches just aren't giving results.

Used with a carefully selected team, it helps bring the experience of all team members into play during problem solving.

This increases the richness of solutions explored (meaning finding better solutions and making better decisions.) It can also help get buy in from team members for the solution chosen - after all, they have helped create that solution.

Brainstorming and Lateral Thinking

Brainstorming is a lateral thinking process. It asks that people come up with ideas and thoughts that seem at first to be a bit shocking or crazy. Later, you can then change and improve them into ideas that are useful, and often stunningly original.

During brainstorming sessions there should therefore be no criticism of ideas: The goal is to open up possibilities and break down wrong assumptions about the limits of the problem. Judgments and analysis at this stage stunt idea generation.

Ideas should only be evaluated at the end of the brainstorming session - when solutions are developed further using conventional approaches.

Individual Brainstorming

Individual brainstorming tends to produce a wider range of ideas than with group brainstorming – since no one worries about other people's egos or opinions, and can therefore be more freely creative. Ideas, however, tend to be developed less effectively when working alone without the experience of a group to help.

Group Brainstorming

Group brainstorming can be very effective as it uses the experience and creativity of all members of the group. When individual members reach their limit on an idea, another member's creativity and experience can take the idea to the next stage. Therefore, group brainstorming tends to develop ideas in more depth than individual brainstorming.

Brainstorming in a group can be risky for individuals. Valuable but strange suggestions may appear stupid at first sight. Because of such, sessions must be firmly chaired so that “trigger happy” people do not crush these ideas and leave group members feeling humiliated.

The ground rules for a group brainstorming session are as follows:

Define the problem clearly, and lay out any criteria to be met;
Keep the session focused on the problem;
Ensure that no one criticizes or evaluates ideas during the session. Criticism introduces an element of risk for group members when putting forward an idea. This stifles creativity and cripples the free running nature of a good brainstorming session;

· Encourage an enthusiastic, uncritical attitude among members of the group. Try to get everyone to contribute and develop ideas, including the quietest members of the group;

· Let people have fun brainstorming. Encourage them to come up with as many ideas as possible, from solidly practical ones to wildly impractical ones. Welcome creativity;

Ensure that no train of thought is followed for too long;
Encourage people to develop other people's ideas, or to use other ideas to create new ones ; and
Appoint one person to note down ideas that come out of the session. A good way of doing this is to use a flip chart (which can be viewed via a webinar.) This should be studied and evaluated after the session.

Where possible, participants in the brainstorming process should come from a wide range of disciplines related to the problem. This brings a broad range of experience to the session and helps to make it more creative.

The TechPar Group Grey Team Process:

The TechPar Group Grey Team process is adapted from the ideas described above. It consists of five phases:

1. Defining the problem to be solved. This is frequently done in the context of developing the client proposal. The definition is reduced to a brief write up.

2. Carefully selecting the team members. The particular people selected will, of course, depend on the problem to be solved. It is common for client personnel to be part of the team.

3. Individual Brainstorming. As noted above, individual brainstorming is best for generating many ideas, but tends to be less effective at developing them. It is TPG’s experience that the best option is to combine the two approaches by asking the team members to come to the group session with a list of ideas.

4. Group Brainstorming. Group brainstorming tends to develop fewer ideas, but takes each idea further. However, if the group process is started with individually developed ideas, the process can be rich in both idea generation and development. All group brainstorming needs formal rules for it to work smoothly.

5. Documentation. A designated scribe has the chore of listening to the discussion, maintaining the “flip chart”, and writing up the results. Generally, this person will give priority to listening over participation in the discussion.

Brainstorming is a great way of generating new ideas. The TPG Grey Team process is designed to capture the best aspects of this approach – carefully selected people with deep experience using a combination of individual and group brainstorming.