Research Based Improvements to the Value Workshop Industry – Part 4

Facilitation Best Practices and Temporal Strategies

Thank you for sticking with us through the last three articles discussing the background, physical tools, and mentals tools for improving group facilitation. We finish the series with temporal strategies to keep your participants engaged in the process and maximize on efficiencies. Let’s dive into the final sections of this four-part series.

Facilitation requires physical and psychological tools to ensure participants are given the best environment for success. However, you can use all the physical and psychological tools in the world, but if the timing is off, you’ll find the group often unintentionally limits themselves. Timing is king. And we’re not just talking about when you start or end a task, but how you approach timing-related challenges. Are participants just focusing on one area of creativity? Are they losing focus when developing? Do they neglect others’ ideas instead of adding to them?

All of these challenges relate directly to timing, and each of these challenges also have creative solutions. This last article dissects our favorite ways to approach group timing and break the cycle of unproductivity.  

Utilize Sequential Categories in Brainstorming

Have you ever participated in a workshop where a majority of the promising creativity focuses on a small number of categories rather than fully exploring all areas? After priming has occurred and creativity has begun, groups often find themselves fumbling to branch out with their ideas. They overload popular, easy-to-consider functions with promising ideas rather than delving into less considered aspects.

To overcome this, we implement the strategy of introducing new categories* sequentially rather than all at once to encourage deeper exploration of less popular categories and enhance performance, especially in later stages.

*Note: Categories in this context would be functions or elements. Increasing the number of functions helps to diversify ideas generated.

The number of categories is also important, as studies showing 10 categories are usually more effective than studies with just two categories.

It is also important to encourage cross-disciplinary interactions between each category. If participants are only allowed/encouraged to contribute to categories where they feel comfortable, less radical and diverse ideas will be introduced into the final collection of concepts.

Keep Stages Short

In addition to sequential categories, maintaining engagement and minimizing social loafing by structuring the brainstorming session into short stages allows participants to shift efforts frequently and stay focused and engaged. Especially in virtual workshops, the tightly sequential nature of each category leads to shorter facilitator-team member interaction periods and increases interactions points.

Shifting categories within shorter time periods, such as 7–15 minutes, reduces the amount of time each team member is left to their own individual insulated creativity. Proactive measures to engage team members at more frequent interaction points reduces the probability that the team member disengages from the process.

This does not mean to reduce the total creativity duration, just program more facilitator-team member interaction points as long as team members are achieving thought failure in each category.

Leverage Long-Term Memory Recall (LTM)*

Each team member has a vast reservoir of experience to draw upon, but that can easily go unused. While brainstorming creative, new ideas, it can be tempting to solely focus on finding that one “unused” method. It is often the methods used prior that present the most promise.

Encourage exercises that tap into participants’ long-term memory for idea generation, as this can lead to more diverse and innovative ideas. Avoid early convergence to ensure that the full potential of LTM recall is utilized. When participants are required to generate ideas while simultaneously listening and piggybacking off others’ ideas, the ability for participants’ thought process to achieve thought failure is diminished; instead, anchoring occurs. This leads to less diverse ideas which reduces the effectiveness of a diverse multi-disciplinary group.

*Note: We discussed LTM in more depth in Part 3 – “Facilitation Best Practices and Process and Mental Tools”.

Capitalize with Piggybacking*

After individual creativity slows, it is often beneficial to encourage collaborative creativity in the form of idea piggybacking. It is important to program into the creativity process the chance to attend to other’s ideas in hopes of combining/elaborating each idea further.

This piggybacking should be a separate process from individual brainstorming to allow team members to fully tap into their own creativity. Piggybacking off others’ ideas may also help generate new categories or thought strings to pursue for the team members.

It is assumed that this piggybacking and collaboration is why in-person workshops are so valuable; however, production blocking is significantly increased, and the illusion of group productivity (the tendency of group members to overestimate the effectiveness and output of their group’s work compared to individual efforts) is high if team members are not able to fully exhaust their LTM first.

Paulus et al. (1993) argues that social comparison processes contribute to this illusion issue. Participants may feel good about their performance of idea generation in conjunction with their group members; however, that may be counterproductive to the actual output of ideas.

*Note: We discussed Piggybacking in more depth in Part 3 – “Facilitation Best Practices and Process and Mental Tools”.

Conclusion

Remote and hybrid work environments are the new normal for a lot of clients, and what was once a means to an end, is now a capitalized opportunity. Organizations are leaning into the advantages offered by virtual workshops, specifically electronic brainstorming (EBS).

By implementing these practical recommendations, teams can stimulate productivity, generate a multitude of innovative ideas, and overcome the limitations posed by traditional in-person group brainstorming and production blocking. Embracing the power of EBS, either virtual or in-person will undoubtedly drive creativity, collaboration, and success in the ever-evolving landscape of innovation.

The question to ask is less of Are in person workshops better than virtual workshops? and more How do we perform our workshops and manage the different environments?

Again, thank you so much for sticking with us to the end of this four-part series. Our goal is to help implement tools and processes to be utilized within virtual, in-person, and even hybrid workshops. The dialog is not over, so if you have questions or additional conversation on group facilitation tools and processes, please reach out and join the discussion.