Leading from the Middle

“Office Brainstorms Are a Waste of Time.”
That’s the headline for a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Instead, “giving workers alone time could yield more innovation than getting everyone in a room”.
It depends.
If your work group is all on board, thoughtful, and trusting of each other, I can see where good ideas get even better in a group discussion setting.
If your group features sore losers or high-fiving winners or is unable or unwilling to think about options, or harbors mistrust, then the brainstorm indeed will be a waste of time.
In the 147 comments to the WSJ article some individuals claim they make better decisions than any group. I call them soloists.
Here’s an example:
“After my 36 successful years in corporate America where group think and collaboration was typically mandatory (and very ineffective and unproductive,) I am glad to see that someone has finally stated the obvious!
While branded a "lone wolf" on occasion, much more often than naught, my individual ideas/strategies produced better results (i.e. higher revenue, higher profit, greater share and high levels of client satisfaction) than an(y) idea initiated in a collaborative manner.”
Narcissism? Maybe not.
Soloists – including me – may well be on target much of the time but, now and then, we mis-fire or miss the bull’s eye by a mile.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize there’s a positive need to allow other ideas and judgements to get a fair hearing.
When that’s missing, this unhappy brainstormer's comment will resonate for many:
“I loathe (brainstorming), partly because of the blowhards with little ideas, but mostly because those same people are very quick to denigrate others’ ideas. I’m basically shy and when they do that, it makes me keep my ideas to myself.”
For me, the most disappointing part of b-storming is the final step – the act of choosing democratically among the options listed out for action.
I’ve been part of what seems like a very successful listing out of options and then we falter; we fail to make choices. We have a long list but appear unable to “separate the wheat from the chaff”. We run out of time and enthusiasm and that inevitably leads to dismay with the whole process.
We fail, resoundingly, at the winnowing and threshing out among the listed ideas.
Another wasted brainstorming session!
Bees Do It Better.
No, not a bumper sticker for anti-brainstorming but a collaborative lifeline for us from “humanity’s greatest friend among the insects”, the honey bee.
When I teach about team collaboration and the need to hear from those who rarely speak up, I offer up an example from when I was working with MBA students as a group facilitator.
We’d taken a large group into the forest and were using a variety of games to underline what they’d been learning about team work.
One of the games had my group stymied.
It involved about 20 or so students and required them to extract something from the middle of a circle.
Each person was at least ten feet away from the center. A couple of the students were adamant on what to do and were vociferous in letting the group know their’s was the best and only feasible idea.
My co-facilitator and I saw this as an opportunity to see what happens when the loudest voices get shut down, so we muted the two students.
We told them they were not to speak for the duration of the event and then turned to the group and opened up the discussion.
As luck would have it, the quietest and most thoughtful-looking of the group finally spoke up.
To the chagrin of the two muted students (biting their tongues and red in the face) her idea was implemented by the group and the object retrieved.
The muted students may have learned something, or nothing.
But, we had made clear to the other students that those participants who don’t speak up all the time may have something of value to offer and it is a leader’s role to help get those ideas out.
Bees, when selecting a new hive, display some fundamentals for effective group decision making:
1. No dominating leader
2. A strong incentive to make a good decision (survival)
3. One problem to solve.
4. An agreed upon process.
5. Use “quorum responses” for cohesion, accuracy and speed.
(A quorum response is an antidote to endless debate. Once a threshold number is reached among bees for where to nest, that is a quorum and those bees that have yet to be persuaded, now stop advertising and sign on to the chosen nest. When humans require buy in among a group, one way to winnow down the ideas is to do periodic anonymous straw polls. As participants cluster around ideas, the hold-outs begin to concede.
Research shows that in the bees’ life and death decision about a new nesting site, the winner is often, impressively so, the very best site for the new hive!)
The bees’ quorum response technique might well have rescued the several brainstorming sessions, in which I was a participant, that went nowhere.

N. B. I write this from Latvia, a land of bee keepers and farmers. Left alone, Latvians would all be farmers and live off the land with honey and beer in abundance.

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And, for the democratic worker bee, there’s,
Buy here.


© Copyright commentary by John Lubans 2023