A reverse, internet-inspired view of idea facilitation

When Roger Neill and his team from Synectics facilitated a workshop yesterday at the Silicon Valley comes to Oxford event at Said Business School, they used a technique that allowed for capturing as many ideas as possible but also involved prioritisation and in-depth analysis of the top ideas.

I used similar techniques for facilitating workshops when I worked as a management consultant, but yesterday it occurred to me that the process can be explained in light of popular internet tools:

• The purpose of a brainstorm is to produce as many ideas as possible. The facilitator would seed the creativity whenever the flow of ideas slowed down (e.g. "What ideas spring to mind if they didn't have to be legal?"). This step is equivalent to blog posts and the comments they attract: Representing individual thoughts, lightly linked.
• With no shortage of ideas after half an hour of brainstorming, the task was one of prioritising. There are many ways to achieve this but did so by voting which allows for making group decisions in a short space of time. This step is equivalent to social content sites like digg (digg.com) where a 'wisdom of crowds' interaction allows identification and promotion of the most popular stories.
• The top priority ideas required more in-depth analysis and presentation. We split into sub-groups to prepare a flip chart page on each idea to present back all attendees and our 'client'. This step is equivalent to contributing to Wikipedia where each article is shaped as a highly collaborative effort.

The analogy could be extended further to describe how the Wikipedia community votes on deleting articles and how the most relevant and pertinent articles on Wikipedia are linked to by websites and blogs thus climbing in the ranking of the search engines.

Today's web is highly participative.

Tags: facilitation participation Said Business School Oxford University Silicon Valley comes to Oxford brainstorm blogs digg voting wikipedia