Tips on Developing Creative Options

Groups have the tendency to jump to decisions and answers before exploring a range of possible ways to approach a situation. Two of the many causes for good ideas being overlooked or shut down are lack of preparation and inadequate brainstorming.

 

Realistically, when busy people are participating in a group on a volunteer basis, they might not have the time and resources to come to every meeting fully prepared. If you find that it is just not practical to assume that people will come to meetings well prepared, it might be better in the long run to consider arranging the agenda to include time for the group to share information rather than just jumping into what promises to be a frustrating attempt at making an ill-informed decision. Preparation is one of the primary ingredients of efficient decision making in groups.

Questions for effective preparation

• What are the specific issues to be resolved and who will be affected by the outcome?
• What are each of the parties' interests? What does each person care about and why?
• Recognizing the varied interests of the group, what broad set of options (or pieces of options) are available?
• By what objective criteria should the decision be made?
• Consult the group's original purpose and goals
• Consider using precedent, a third-part expert, joint data collection, etc. to establish objectively fair criteria
• What challenges do we anticipate in implementing this decision? How can we prevent or overcome those challenges?

  One of the most influential things a group can do to make good decisions together is to set aside time and energy for brainstorming a range of options before deciding on a particular path forward.

Tips for productive brainstorming

1. Lay out the purposes of brainstorming
   • To share existing ideas
   • To build on each others' ideas and come up with new ones
2. Set a time limit
3. Write all of the ideas where everyone can see and add to them
4. Set the groundrule that no ideas can be evaluated during brainstorming - it is often the craziest ideas that spark the most constructive ones
5. Do not stop brainstorming at the first pause. People will first say the things that have already occurred to them but they will need time and possibly some prompting to come up with entirely new and creative ideas.

Some possible questions to prompt more ideas include:

• What would someone else say about this?
• What might we do if we had no resource or time constraints?
• What would we do if the Forest Service would do whatever we asked them to?
• What else could we do?
• If we couldn't do any of these things, what other things could we do that would meet our interests?

Stages of the Collaborative Process

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