The Collaboration Challenge

From LEGO® Serious Play™   in Thunder Bay, Ontario. : www.lloydsmith.ca

The Collaboration Challenge
 
Many people think that innovation comes from the hard work of one individual, someone who quietly works alone and then one day surprises the world by announcing their great findings. This is not what actually happens. Most great ideas come from the collective efforts of a team of people working closely together, bouncing ideas in such a way that at the end of the day, no one seems to actually remember who came up with the idea in the first place.

Often, one person is given credit for the idea. This is how our society and culture function; we like to attribute success to one person.  In reality, innovation stems from the collective efforts of a high-functioning team of individuals. They are more interested in solving the problem for the collective good than in taking the credit for having an idea.

The notion of collaboration is easy to define, but it is not always so easy to put into practice.  In other words, we like to talk about the concept and we agree that collaboration is valuable; but when it comes to practicing it, people can get caught up in the same patterns of behavior. If you have worked on a group project, you might to able to relate to this.

So if collaboration can generate a greater number of useful ideas, how do we get our groups doing this successfully? Let us examine one way in which collaboration works more effectively, the brainstorming technique.

In the 1950s, Alex Osborn created the notion of brainstorming as a way to generate solutions. The group gets together specifically to solve the stated problem.  Group participants come up with as many creative ideas as they can.  Evaluation is held back at this stage as ideas are generated.  When an exhausted list is created and captured on the whiteboard, the leader than asks the participants to use some type of system to rate the ideas. This is where sticky notes or little red dots are used.  Generally, the ideas that carry the popular vote are carried forward.  The thinking error is, “If the majority of people believe the idea is a good one, it must be correct.”

Many people enjoy being a part of this type of group brainstorming session, making a popular choice for team leaders and consultants.  Research, on the other hand, indicates that this type of problem solving actually produces very poor results; it does not work for everyone. However, we seem to continue to use this process because people enjoy it and feel the experience is positive.

Yale University studied the brainstorming technique and found a better way to use this well-liked process.  Instead of working together throughout the entire process, each person works individually for the first part of the session. Research finds that when people work as individuals, there are fewer ideas but the quality of the ideas is higher. By removing the distractions caused by other team members, including the ideas that are not on topic, people are able to work at a higher level.  This method also allows for the introverts or less vocal team members to think and create ideas.  Since they usually make up almost 50% of the population, this process captures untapped potential.  Osborn’s idea of brainstorming still works here, it is just done individually.  The individual creates as many ideas as possible and then uses a process to analyze the ideas, thinking about feasibility and effectiveness. The precursor for success is still the ability of the team to accurately define the problem.

Albert Einstein was supposedly asked what he would do if he had one hour to save the world. He responded by saying, "I would spend the first 55 minutes analyzing and understanding the problem, and the next five minutes generating ideas." So before you begin any brainstorming or collaborating activity, no matter what method you use, make sure you have the right problem stated in the beginning.