From Brainstorming to Meetings I

Stop wasting time during meetings.

Let’s start with the following questions: have you attended meetings which takes at least two hours? In that meeting, have your team ended up with nothing decided or done in the process? Have the whole team digressed so much in that meeting that the main talking points are totally thrown out of the window? When do you allow discussion of ideas and when must you have to take the hammer to crush dissent and come to a decision? If you have attended such meetings which ninety nine percent of the readers here do, you have attended a badly managed and chaired meeting. That is not the brunt of the problem. In Asia, you have to deal with a much difficult issue: getting people to speak out and voice their views. If they do start voicing out, there is a difficulty in controlling their opinions.

A brainstorming session is not a meeting

Let’s begin from first establishing two key concepts correctly: meetings and brainstorming sessions. In principle, they are very different creatures to handle. You want to have meetings because you want to get things done. What do I mean by that? At the end of the meeting, as the chairman or chairperson, you must confirm the action points with your team and your secretary to that meeting will tabluate and disseminate them to the rest. In short, the aim of the meeting is to get things done. Meetings usually take about half an hour to two hours, depending on the agenda points that are proposed. The time to discuss over a issue also varies, but it should not take longer than ten minutes, unless it is an extremely difficult decision that requires you and your team to sleep on it.

Brainstorming sessions are different. It is a session where it can last the whole day with interludes of pizza and beer to keep you and your team going. The aim of the brainstorming session is to generate new ideas, new scenarios and new strategies to deal with a specific subject. Retreats for management in corporate companies are meant to do that. Usually, you end up creating a report or a set of ideas which can be tabled to a meeting that makes the final decision on which to be accepted or rejected. In short, brainstorming sessions do not take so much consideration into action points.

Making an efficent brainstorming session

The workflow of a brainstorming session is described in the following manner:
1. Set the aims and Specify the problem: The leader of the session sets the objectives, timeline and milestones for the many hours of brainstorming in the start. He laid down the rules and notify every participant of the brainstorming session with all the knowledge of the problem.
2. Idea Generation: The team will bounce out different ideas and propositions to the leader. It’s the leader’s job to elucidate and assimilate them by classifying them in different categories. The leader can also attempt to use different classification systems to get a better insight to the idea at hand.
3. Selection of the most appropriate idea: Notice that I did not use the word “best”. In the real world, most situations are complex. Sometimes, there are problems which are difficult to be solved. Making a consensus decision out of a complex problem requires the idea to be the most appropriate to the present and perhaps not to the future. The art of getting the most appropriate idea is to ensure that the idea can be modified or tweaked with the other ideas which are presented on the table.

To generate an efficient brainstorming session, the rules of engagement are

• The more ideas the merrier: A brainstorming process is a divergent production, which aims to solve a problem by generating ideas as many as possible to find the silver bullet to the problem. Usually, a good leader should make sure that the different aspects of the problem are well-classified into different categories and establish the prioritization of the ideas.
• Don’t be a skeptic, cynic or critic: If you want to do the above-mentioned, it is not for the sake of tearing down ideas, but rather to offer alternative view points to why a particular idea does not seem to work. The way to do this is to put the idea on the list, but place the weaknesses and strengths of the idea later.
• Welcome out of the box ideas: This is obvious. If you do get one out of that meeting, it means that you have a successful session. Not all out of the box ideas work, but you must entertain impossible ideas to challenge the boundaries of the problem.
• Synergizing them into an effective strategy: At the end of the day, you must end up making a good decision on extracting the good components of the ideas discussed and integrate it with existing technologies. There are times where a revolution is required in mapping out an idea, but it is advised that you should introduce small changes to the system because of resistance from an older and conservative management.

Most people, including bureaucrats and professionals tend to make the same mistake in mixing up the notion of meeting and brainstorming altogether. As a result, you ended up in a meeting which you are brainstorming again. Don’t you find it frustrating when you spend two hours walking into a meeting to get a decision out but only get hanged on the spot?

Of course, brainstorming can be more complex and be adapted from different situations. Perhaps, having a basic rule here can help you in shaping the flow of the discussion in the right way.

To be continued: In the next article, I will continue on how to manage an efficient meeting within an hour.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurship, Singapore Entrepreneurs, Meetings, Management, Brainstorming

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