Ideation in groups and production blocking

Julian Williams
30.07.20
Innovation Culture

When you think of brainstorming and creating ideas, working in groups goes hand in hand, right?

Well, not always.

Brainstorming, innovation sprints and innovation breakouts are all great ways of ideating and fostering an innovation culture, but are they the most effective ways for your organisation to harness the collective brain power of each individual? Or is your approach to innovating within a group setting blocking innovation and actually contradicting what you’re setting out to achieve?

In this post I highlight the trends I’ve observed within organisations when it comes to innovating in a group setting and the barriers that can sometimes arise. I also offer some advice on how you can overcome the issues that can often arise when innovating in groups (if you read on for the gooey, chocolatey centre, that is).

First, a question:

Who is more likely to come up with a higher number of quality ideas?

A group of individuals, discussing ideas in a brainstorming type environment?
Individuals ideating in solitude?

It’s 1 right?

Wrong!

According to Prof. Dr. Daan Stam from the University of Rotterdam, research suggests that idea creation is better performed at an individual level.

I know this contradicts many of our assumptions, but bear with me.

There’s a psychological element to innovating, and different subliminal techniques and cues that go unnoticed may hinder the output of group sessions.

Production blocking

Let’s use the example of a team of individuals from different lines of an organisation, who are looking to create some new ideas for a chocolate bar (staying on theme here), to explain production blocking (who doesn’t love a metaphor?). There are four individuals from each department.

What works well in a team setting is that individuals can inspire others with their ideas, and create synergy and synchronicity within the unit. However, if you are looking to maximise the output of quality ideas, engaging all individuals at a group level early on in your ideation process can result in production blocking. More on that in a moment. Let’s see below what happens when one person (Shania from the Product Department) shares an idea within a group brainstorming setting and how the group will typically react:

This is a classic example of production blocking: although a great idea may have been uncovered, the output of ideas from the session has been minimal. Shania has voiced a great idea and Cecil from sales has supported it, but Shania’s idea has distracted Trent and Robbo from contributing their own ideas, stopping their creative juices from flowing and eventually leading the group to focus solely on Shania’s idea. This is typical of many group-based sessions in organisations; teams go in with great expectations of high idea output and the outcome from the session is essentially hijacked by one or very few ideas.

Evaluation apprehension

Another example I’ve witnessed personally is evaluation apprehension. This is a model proposed by Nikolas B Cottrell in 1972. At a high level, it describes the anxiety induced in an individual when they’re judged by others, as well as the fear of receiving negative feedback or no positive feedback at all. I’ll use the same team to give an example:

Because of evaluation apprehension, Trent didn’t voice his idea, which could have been a revolutionary idea for the organisation. Because of the inherent risk of putting forward his idea, Trent decided against sharing it as Shania’s idea looked like a safe bet. Robbo thought Shania had a great idea and felt his idea was poor in comparison. Because he didn’t feel his idea would be as successful, Robbo chose not to vocalise his thoughts. The old cliché “no idea is a bad idea” rings true here: the ideas that Trent and Robbo chose not to mention could have been great ideas! And if they weren’t feasible at this point in time, they could have been revolutionary in six months’ time? How can we overcome these types of scenarios?

Nominal group technique (NGT)

One way to overcome these problems is by using the nominal group technique. The nominal group technique allows individuals to ideate in silence. It allows everyone to have an opinion and enables individuals to collect their own ideas, rank ideas and vote on them, which encourages engagement and collaboration from every member of your innovation team.

NGT encourages group brainstorming in a structured way, collecting ideas from individuals prior to brainstorming sessions so that your sessions can be utilised to maximum effect.

At Idea Drop, we’ve identified what we think is a very effective way of running NGT sessions:

Identify and assemble team members
Set a challenge/goal
Allow a silent brainstorming session
Review/rate ideas in the team
Present and collaborate on ideas in group brainstorming session
Prioritise and implement ideas

Using an innovation management tool like Idea Drop is a great way of utilising NGT and best practices when it comes to group innovation.

You can use Idea Drop to set an idea challenge and then encourage individuals to ideate at their own pace, in their own environment. Capturing ideas on Idea Drop at the silent brainstorming stage can be invaluable in helping organisations to overcome the production blocking barrier.

Idea Drop’s cloaking function enables individuals to overcome evaluation apprehension when ideating, so it’s a great way to encourage individuals to post ideas. And their confidence receives a huge boost when their colleagues start to rate and “favourite” their ideas!

Once all the ideas have been collected, individuals are encouraged to rate and comment on the ideas before moving into the group collaboration and brainstorming phase.

Idea Drop can assist with idea prioritisation and implementation via Pipeline, our idea workflow tool, which enables organisations to monitor the output of ideas and to ensure a clear action plan and line of communication throughout the ideas lifecycle.