Structured Brainstorming and Pre-mortems

When I was working in the mid-1990's, I developed a technique that I called Structured Brainstorming based on the Group Techniques for Program Planning: A Guide to Nominal Group and Delphi Processes . It began by writing an open-ended question on a flip chart. Then each member of the team would spend some quiet time recording their answers to the question on their individual notepads. Then I would go around the team, one member at a time, and ask them for their first idea. I would write it on the flip chart, in exactly the words that they told me, and assign a number to the idea. No one was allowed to comment on the ideas that were presented at this time. I would continue to go around the team one at a time until all of their ideas are recorded on the flip chart paper. Then, as a team, we would group the ideas into categories. We named the categories and I labelled them as letters of the alphabet. Then we would prioritize the categories using an anonymous ranking process in which I used a Borda Count methodology. The whole session usually took about 45 minutes. Then I would go away with the flip charts and write up a summary of the ideas, according to the prioritized categories.

When I was running a workshop, I had to train the facilitators of the teams on the technique. I would run a Structured Brainstorming session with the question: What could go wrong with this workshop? Most of the time, this exercise was very refreshing. The facilitators got their worries recorded and evaluated. They were often relieved that their worries were being taken seriously. This led them to conduct a successful workshop were they avoided the potential problems.

Daniel Kahneman, who wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow distrusts project managers' ability to predict future program costs because they often have in inside view. Kahneman's distrust for the intuition of project managers is criticized by Gary Klein who wrote Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions and is a proponent of the naturalistic decision making processes of experts.

Klein has a novel approach that he recommends for project managers which he calls a Performing a Project Premortem . In a pre-mortem, the project team imagines they have completed the project but it has failed to deliver on time and within budget. They imagine all the ways the project could go astray.

I thought this was similar to my Structured Brainstorming method of training facilitators for workshops.