Check and Challenge - Executive Insight

Do you ever wonder whether members of your  team, department or wider organisation are on the same page in respect of the direction of your business?

Tired of sitting around a flip chart brainstorming about organisational development?

 In fact, according to academics in Texas Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith, did you know that brainstorming alone proved to be more effective than brainstorming collectively. In those first five minutes, participants who sat at a computer and generated ideas came up with 44 percent more ideas than those in a group. This challenges received wisdom that says groups of people will come up with a wider range of ideas than similar minded people or those working alone. But what it takes into account is that when we come together, like it or not, we all start to become a little homogenized. What this finding implies is that the way to get the creative value of diversity is to encourage people to develop ideas alone, and only then bring them together.

Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith’s analysis is impressive, not least because it reflects an appreciation that the executives who do brainstorming are also human beings. This means that they become anxious about their own contributions; in academic parlance, they suffer from ‘evaluation apprehension,’ meaning that they worry people will think their wild ideas foolish. Sometimes there are too many ideas and we can’t keep them all in our heads. Then there’s the phenomenon psychologists call ‘social loafing,’ which we probably all recognize: the people who sit at the back of the room contributing nothing at all. Only slightly less lazy is ‘social matching,’ which means that we are very likely to contribute lots of ideas so similar to each other as to be indistinguishable; it feels like we’re making a contribution, but the range and variety of suggestions remains small. Conformity plays a big part here; our desire to belong restricts the breadth of ideas we might think of but don’t dare to offer.

Taken from an article “Why Brain Storming Doesn’t Work by Margaret Heffernan

In light of this Wesport has teamed up with Footdown Leadership gurus to offer an Insight Day for organisations which throws away the flipcharts and embarked on a card game which teases out the thoughts of a team in an fun and most importantly anonymous environment where everyone plays a part and the thoughts of the group are clearly collated into priority areas for further development.

It is not an idea generation forum in itself but provide real focus for organisations who can offer struggle to home in on what really matters…what are they all about and what do they do well and not so well.

An Executive Insight workshop will quickly identify 2-3 priority issues which when addressed will add significant value to your business and drive tremendous organisational development.

Why not review the Wesport Case Study.