By Dan Stokols, Maritza Salazar, Gary M. Olson, and Judith S. Olson
2. Maritza Salazar (biography)
3. Gary M. Olson (biography)
4. Judith S. Olson (biography)
How can cross-disciplinary research teams increase their capacity for generating and integrating novel research ideas and conceptual frameworks?
A key challenge faced by research teams is harnessing the intellectual synergy that can occur when individuals from different disciplines join together to create novel ideas and conceptual frameworks. Studies of creativity suggest that atypical (and often serendipitous) combinations of dissimilar perspectives can spur novel insights and advances in knowledge. Yet, many cross-disciplinary teams fail to achieve intellectual synergy because they allot insufficient effort to generating new ideas. Here we describe a brainstorming tool that can be used to generate new ideas in cross-disciplinary teams.
The idea tree exercise
This exercise is straightforward and requires few resources other than pens or pencils, blank sheets of paper, and a table at which eight to ten team members representing two or more disciplines are seated as shown in the image near the bottom of this post. At the start of the exercise, each participant is given a blank piece of paper and asked to work independently and write their initial ideas at the top of the page. Depending on the specific group task, the ideas can relate to a research question or hypothesis, a new concept or method, or outline for a proposed study. The scope of the brainstorming task can be left relatively open-ended, or focused more narrowly on particular topics relevant to the cross-disciplinary team (eg., neuroscience, climate change, health disparities research). During the three to four minutes allotted for this part of the exercise, individuals are encouraged to avoid being too self-critical of their own entries, even when their ideas seem too preliminary or provocative.
Once all participants have written down their ideas, they each pass their page to the person sitting next to them. Participants are asked to adopt a supportive and inclusive stance toward the ideas they have now received, taking three to four minutes to write a brief reaction. For example, they can elaborate on the original idea or pose a question about it. Each sheet of ideas is then passed on again, making its way to each participant around the table and gathering additional entries extending the thread of ideas triggered by the initial prompt.
After the pages have been reviewed and annotated by all participants, they are returned to the individuals who wrote the initial entry. Thus, every member of the team receives a page containing several elaborations of his or her initial idea from the respective vantage points of other participants.
Each completed page, in effect, reflects a branch of the overall idea tree created by the group as a whole. The idea tree tool is designed to harvest several new ideas in a relatively short period of time and facilitate serendipitous combinations of disparate views among members of cross-disciplinary teams.
With eight to ten participants, a complete round of this brainstorming exercise can be done in about 45 minutes to an hour.
General insights gleaned from the idea tree exercise
Besides generating several new research ideas among team members, the exercise elicits more general insights about brainstorming processes in team science. After participants have finished commenting on the ideas offered by other team members, they are invited to discuss the results of their collaborative brainstorming, which commonly reveals the following insights:
- conceptual synergy is unleashed by connecting disparate (and sometimes competing) viewpoints as a basis for discovering new ideas
- a relatively large number of ideas can be generated when participants adopt a supportive, inclusive stance toward each other’s entries and agree to take only a few minutes to write down each of their own thoughts and reactions to others’ ideas
- deadlines and time pressure can assist discovery of new ideas
- using diagrams and drawings to formulate and convey one’s ideas has generative value.
Conclusion
A crucial goal of cross-disciplinary research teams is the creation of new ideas and conceptual frameworks that advance knowledge within and across fields. The idea tree has proven useful as a brainstorming tool in cross-disciplinary training and research settings. The exercise is especially helpful in prompting novel links between disparate ideas, although the processes of prioritizing, refining and integrating insights derived from the idea tree require longer-term collaborative discussion and metacognition, as described in Machiel Keestra’s recent blog post. Not all of the ideas gathered through the exercise will be deemed sufficiently novel and useful to warrant further development. However, the more time and effort allocated by research teams to knowledge creation and integration activities, the better their prospects for achieving cross-disciplinary insights that trigger scientific and societal advances. The idea tree can be used by research teams at repeated intervals to build their capacity for knowledge discovery and integration. The idea tree is one of the methods used in our research and training initiatives at University of California, Irvine’s Team Science Acceleration Lab described in our previous blog post on strengthening the ecosystem for effective team science.
Have you used alternative brainstorming tools in cross-disciplinary research teams? We welcome your thoughts about other idea generation tools and your reactions to the idea tree exercise if you have occasion to use it in an educational or research context.
Some additional resources for collaborative brainstorming:
Adams, J. L. (2001). Conceptual blockbusting: A guide to better ideas. 4th edn, Basic Books: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Gordon, W. J. J. (1974). Some source material in discovery-by-analogy. Journal of Creative Behaviour, 8: 239-257
McKim, R. H. (1980). Thinking visually: A strategy manual for problem solving. Wadsworth: Belmont, California United States of America
Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination (Appendix: On intellectual craftsmanship, pp.195-226). Oxford University Press, New York, United States of America
Uzzi, B., Mukherjee, S., Stringer, M., and Jones, B. (2013). Atypical combinations and scientific impact. Science, 342, 6157: 468-472
Wicker, A. W. (1985). Getting out of our conceptual ruts. American Psychologist, 40: 1094-1103
Acknowledgement:
We thank the Office of Research and the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, USA for their support of this work.
Biography: Dan Stokols is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, USA and served as founding Dean of the university’s School of Social Ecology. His research spans the fields of social ecology, environmental and ecological psychology, public health, and transdisciplinary team science. He is author of Social Ecology in the Digital Age and co-author of Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science.
Biography: Maritza Salazar is an assistant professor at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, USA. Her research focuses on learning and innovation in teams and organizations, especially enhancing the competitiveness of firms, the effectiveness of teams, and the quality of the work experience for individuals. She serves as President of the International Network for the Science of Team Science (INSciTS).
Biography: Gary M. Olson is Professor Emeritus and formerly Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, USA. The focus of his work has been on how to support small groups of people working on difficult intellectual tasks, particularly when the members of the group are geographically distributed. He co-edited (with Ann Zimmerman and Nathan Bos) Scientific Collaboration on the Internet.
Biography: Judith S. Olson is the Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences Emerita in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, USA. For over 20 years, she has researched teams whose members are not collocated. She co-authored (with Gary Olson) Working Together Apart: Collaboration over the Internet.
A very useful tool! I’ve used something similar with sticky notes and flipcharts where participants move around between the ideas adding comments, and on a virtual whiteboard app where participants comment on virtual sticky notes as the discussion evolves. I was wondering if you run a busting jargon exercise beforehand, to smooth over any technical language that might get in the way?
Thanks Sawsan for your comment on our idea tree post. We do provide a brief orientation to the idea tree exercise before team members begin working on it. In the past we haven’t included comments about “jargon-busting” in the orientation but that’s something we can definitely add to the exercise in the future. We’d welcome more details about the jargon-busting messages or sessions you’ve developed. What we do emphasize strongly in the orientation is the importance of being open and receptive both to others’ and one’s own idea entries, and the importance of being kind when commenting on others’ ideas. Sometimes individuals can be hesitant to share their own ideas that seem too weird or far-fetched, and they can also be overly critical of others’ ideas. So we implore all participants to be receptive to ideas that initially might seem too far out, both for their own and others’ ideas, and to be kind in their reactions/responses to others’ idea entries. We try to encourage a mutually supportive, collaborative climate before the exercise begins. Look forward to more exchanges of ideas with you about brainstorming tools for promoting creative research and implementation ideas. Thanks again for your feedback on our post- Dan
I’m not familiar with the phrase “jargon-busting,” Sawsan, but relate to it easily since inter/language and translation are central to integration and collaboration. Dan’s reply to you also introduces the topic of power. Hesitancy to share ideas is often driven by hierarchy, creating an ongoing drag or undertow. So, fostering openness from the beginning is crucial to at least improving odds of overcoming them.
It’s great to hear again from this remarkable team. Your low-tech tool to generate new ideas aims to move past difference to common purpose, a crucial step for achieving trust and inclusivity in teamwork. I’m also struck by use of visualization, including diagrams and drawings that help move past domain-specific jargon to shared conception and interlanguage. I’m curious, though, how team leaders you’ve observed have channeled insights gained from brainstorming to foster integrative and collaborative process throughout all stages of research, as well as reflexivity and iterative adaptation of initial workplans if needed.
Your posting also brought to mind Darbellay, Moody, & Lubart’s 2017 collection of essays on Creativity, Design Thinking and Interdisciplinarity (Springer). While acknowledging the three concepts emerged in different fields, the editors’ bringing of them together called attention to the agility of design thinking at interfaces of expertise. Your tool echoes the importance of dialogical thinking and openness they also highlighted, marrying structure and flexibility. At the same time it brings to mind the Latin root of the English word creativity. “Creativitus” connotes a capacity or a faculty for bringing something new into being–facilitating novel insights and even frameworks as you say.
Julie T Klein
Julie, thanks so much for your thoughtful comments on our idea tree article. We appreciate your mentioning the 2017 volume by Darbellay, Moody, & Lubart on Creativity, Design Thinking, and Interdisciplinarity, which highlights the value of conceptual agility, dialogical thinking, and openness in the creation of novel conceptual and design-related ideas. We look forward to exploring their book further. Also, you raised a very important question about the ways that team leaders can harness the divergent thinking of team individual members as they engage in the idea tree brainstorming exercise and later convert their divergent ideas into more integrative (convergent) collaborative contributions as the team works together during subsequent phases of their research. We have observed this type of sequential progression from initial divergent ideation toward more refined, integrative collaborative contributions among some of the research centers and teams that have used the idea tree exercise. For instance, the leaders of one neuroscience research center content-analyzed the hand-written pages of ideas produced by two separate, multidisciplinary idea tree teams (where each team of 8-9 members generated approximately 90 separate idea entries during a one-hour period). They culled the nearly 200 idea entries produced by two teams in an effort to identify highly novel conceptual “nuggets”. Not all of the idea entries were deemed to be novel and consequential, but about 5-10 of them revealed highly novel conceptual leaps made by individuals from quite different fields as they commented on and extended each others’ ideas. Some of those creative idea kernels were then used by members of the research center as the basis for future extramural research proposals. So you are absolutely right that to be most useful, the divergent thinking stimulated by the idea tree exercise ideally should be followed or combined with subsequent efforts to integrate and converge on those ideas that the group deems most promising for further elaboration and convergent development. For instance, combining the divergent thinking prompted by the idea tree exercise with convergent idea development tools (such as O’Rourke, Crowley et al.’s Philosophical Dialogue workshops) may be a particularly potent strategy for sequentially harvesting and refining creative research and implementation ideas. Thanks again for your valuable insights and comments on our post! Dan
Thanks, Dan, for the example of a neuroscience research center. It makes me curious, as well, about how some members of the center parlayed kernels of particular ideas in subsequent proposals because long-term “transdisciplinary orientation,” to use a concept you and other colleagues developed, is crucial, not just what is generated in the temporal confines of single projects. Good that you also mention the Toolbox Dialogue project. In addition, I highly recommend the Network for Transdisciplinary Research (td-net) Toolbox, which contains other methods for fostering dialogue and collaboration:
https://naturalsciences.ch/co-producing-knowledge-explained/methods/td-net_toolbox
Thank you Julie for your additional insights and good suggestions about our idea tree exercise, including your mention of the TD-Net toolbox for transdisciplinary research and community practice. In our interactions with colleagues at UCI (University of California, Irvine) and beyond, we often mention and draw upon the resources provided in the TD-Net toolbox including the sections on knowledge co-production. Also, we’ve registered the idea tree exercise with Sibylle Studer’s ITD Alliance on TD tool kits and methods sponsored by the Swiss Academy of Arts and Sciences. As for the neuroscience center I mentioned in my reply to your last comment, we have not measured TD orientation among center members directly, but because the center’s mission is to pursue transdisciplinary approaches to neuroscience and related therapeutic innovations, we assume that faculty affiliates self-select into the center with perhaps higher levels of TDO than might be the case for less transdisciplinary centers; and that the experience of working with diverse colleagues in a TD center may help strengthen their TDO over time. These are of course are hunches or hypotheses that could be explored in future research. The members of the UCI center we’ve worked with represent a variety of different fields spanning biomedicine, behavioral science, arts and humanities (including some scholars who are studying neuroscience facets of creative dance). Thanks again Julie for sharing your additional thoughts about the idea tree exercise.
Thank you for your very interesting and useful blog post. I have always found brainstorming to be very suitable and effective for solving problems, especially by generating a large number of ideas. But the idea tree is new to me
I am a member of a research project team in Egypt for producing antiviral face masks combining the skills of 4 disciplines (chemistry, virology, nanotechnology and textile technology). It turns out that we have used something very like the idea tree virtually, when Covid-19 meant we were unable to meet face-to-face.
Each member of the team wrote down their ideas and presented them to the rest of the colleagues. It led to a wonderful discussion and then further virtual brainstorming until we actually came to an agreement about the appropriate textile materials to use in our research.
Thanks a lot for sharing your insights in this helpful blog. I thought that you might be interested to see your tool is applicable in other countries.
Thanks very much Shaimaa – we would love to learn more about how your team has been able to adapt face-to-face brainstorming strategies for research teams to an online format. We are working to adapt the Idea Tree exercise to an online format. Let’s continue to keep in touch about these shared interests. Best wishes, Dan
In our project, my team members and I took a week to think about specific issues related to our project, including reviewing previous research. Then each of us wrote their reflections in point form.
During a subsequent zoom meeting, all of us presented our reflections and the PI collated all the insights, which turned out to be a large number of ideas. We then commented on each idea, resulting in acceptance or rejection. Finally, we implemented the idea with the most support..
Re-posted from Science of Science Policy (SCISIP) listerv:
The issue tree structure that I developed many years ago may well be related to these idea trees. The issue tree is the logical form of every complex issue. Building them often suggests important unasked questions.
See: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/07/10/the-issue-tree-structure-of-expressed-thought/
My crude text book is here: http://www.stemed.info/reports/Wojick_Issue_Analysis_txt.pdf
David,
Many thanks for sharing your article on “The Issue Tree Structure of Expressed Thought” and your text on Issue Analysis and the nature of complex reasoning. There are clearly some shared assumptions underlying your analysis of issue trees and the idea-generation tool we described in our article posted on i2insights.org.
Our efforts to promote intellectual synergy in cross-disciplinary teams and centers is part of a broader effort at UCI to strengthen institutional supports for collaborative scholarship, teaching, and translational research, summarized here: https://i2insights.org/2019/02/19/team-science-ecosystem/.
By posting of our article about idea generation in cross-disciplinary teams, and seeing colleagues’ comments on our post, we have come to learn about your work on issue trees, Paul Paulus’ and his co-authors’ research on Brainwriting, Ron Newman’s Web-based Idea Tree Maps of Collective Wisdom, Machiel Keestra’s Triangulation Technique, Charles Line’s Mind Burst strategy, and Tony Buzan’s Mind Mapping Approach (links to some of these other approaches are noted in earlier comments on our post).
As we continue to discover additional strategies for fostering intellectual synergy in teams, we hope to draw on your collective insights in our efforts to bolster supports for cross-disciplinary collaboration in research and educational contexts.
Thanks again,
Dan
My pleasure Dan. What I like about your technique is it gets everyone on the same page, literally. It works because issues have the hidden tree structure described in my crude textbook (as I discovered in 1973). So does speaking and writing. That is, my issue trees are diagrams of a structure that already exists, like maps of rivers. As such they can be done to precision if needed, although that is laborious.
Another group technique, that I experimented with, divides the group into problem spotters and problem solvers. The latter propose various solutions to the basic problem at issue. The spotters then point out problems with each, which the solvers respond to, etc. This way people do not back or attack specific solutions, which tends to become personal. Also some people prefer each of these roles.
David, thank you for your comments on our idea tree post. Your method of assigning the different roles of problem spotters and solvers is really interesting because it separates out these different stances or vantage points for creative problem solving that are often difficult for individuals to maintain or enact simultaneously. So the division of labor you’ve experimented with can potentially create synergistic refinements of ideas as they emerge from the different vantage points of problem spotters and solvers. I’m reminded of a parallel distinction between divergent and convergent thinking, both of which contribute to a team’s convergent discovery and refinement of creative ideas and problem solutions, though it’s sometimes difficult for the same person to simultaneously engage in both divergent and convergent ideation (though that can be more easily accomplished sequentially, where one’s mode of problem solving shifts from one to the other over time). Our idea tree exercise is intended to maximize individuals’ divergent thinking to generate multiple conceptual outputs that can then be evaluated and selectively elaborated by the group later on in a more convergent fashion. The philosophical toolbox dialogue strategies developed by Michael O’Rourke, Stephen Crowley, and their colleagues at Michigan State and Boise State emphasizes collaborative achievement of cconvergent ideation. So, using the idea tree and toolbox dialogue initiative together and sequentially can powerfully leverage both the divergent and convergent phases of creative idea generation. See also https://cal.msu.edu/news/toolbox-dialogue-initiative-awarded-prize-for-excellence-and-nsf-grant/. Thanks again, Dan
Here’s an article about precision issue treeing: http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html. I never published on it because I was getting sole source federal contracts and did not want to train competitors. Plus a lot was confidential. The last big tree I did was a strategic plan for the Naval Research Lab, circa 1990. Then I moved into the dynamics of issues, called Issue Storms.
Thank you David for sharing the link to your STEM Education Center and your work on mapping the branching structure of ideas – we look forward to exploring your web site further and learning more about your work on creative problem solving.
Re-posted from Science of Science Policy (SCISIP) listerv:
This type of technique can indeed by quite useful. It is basically similar to the brainwriting technique that has been around for some time. I have been involved in a number of studies demonstrating its efficacy (see below a brief excerpt from a chapter that provides details about this research and the brainwriting history and process). Idea Tree is actually a trademark for a really great electronic platform that Ron Newman has developed over a period of years and has employed in various settings. It is likely to be very useful for interdisciplinary efforts. https://www.ideatreelive.com/ideatree/
The section below is from:
Paulus, P. B., & Kenworthy, J. (2019). Effective brainstorming. In P. B. Paulus & B. A. Nijstad (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of group creativity and innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brainwriting
Another approach to idea generation that helps minimize the production blocking problem is brainwriting, which involves sharing of ideas on pieces of paper. Some version of this technique has been popular for a number of years (Geschka , 1993; Goodman, 1995; VanGundy, 1981; 1995). The use of a writing modality in sharing ideas enables one to overcome the problems of verbal brainstorming. Participants are able to generate ideas as they occur and then share them. A critical factor in brainwriting is the balancing of generating time versus reading time. Depending on the procedure, it is possible for someone to just generate ideas or just to read ideas, as in the case of process of posting written notes on a wall. However, typically participants are involved in both aspects of the process.
The Nominal Group Technique also includes a writing component (van de Ven & Delbecq, 1974). This is a highly structured approach of generating ideas, commenting on them and eventually voting. Group members begin a session with writing ideas individually and share them in round-robin fashion with the group. This approach yields more ideas than unstructured group discussion. In a similar study, participants exchanged ideas in the middle of an independent writing session (Madsen & Finger, 1978). This process led to the generation of more ideas for groups of four in comparison to a verbal brainstorming procedure for one problem but not another one. Similarly, VanGundy (1995) found that brainwriting groups generated more ideas than verbal brainstorming groups.
There are a number of studies that have examined a “round-robin” version of brainwriting. This involves a small group seated at the same table, generating ideas on slips of paper and passing them along to the other members to read. For example, in the Paulus and Yang (2000) study groups of four wrote ideas on slips of paper and passed them on to the person on the right. Participants were instructed to read the ideas as they were shared, add their idea, and then pass them on. When the ideas came back to the originator they were placed in the center of the table. This procedure has a number of advantages. It allows participants to generate ideas at will and look at ideas of others during pauses in that process. It also insures that the ideas that are generated will be read by all of the participants, increasing the potential for cognitive stimulation. The continual process of generating and sharing as a group may also provide some motivation to keep up with the idea generation pace of other group members, consistent with the social influence component of the cognitive-social-motivational model of brainstorming (Paulus & Dzindolet, 1993; 2008). Thus social loafing should not be a problem in this paradigm (Karau & Williams, 1993). The sharing of ideas in written form may also reduce evaluation apprehension. Thus there are many reasons to expect this procedure to be an effective means of generating ideas as a group.
Paulus and Yang (2000) conducted the first systematic study to evaluate efficacy of brainwriting groups and nominals. They also assessed the extent to which the idea sharing process had a positive “carry-over” effect to a second solitary writing session. The AMM model suggests that associations generated during idea exchange sessions may continue to be a basis for new ideas after such a session. In the first 15-minute session, a group of four brainwriters generated 40 percent more ideas than did the nominal groups. In the second session, in which all participants generated ideas individually, those who had shared ideas as a group in the first session generated 90 percent more ideas than did those in the nominal condition. Thus this study demonstrated the synergistic effect of group brainstorming, likely from the joint impact of a number of the factors mentioned previously. The continued superior performance of the group condition in the second solitary ideation phase suggests a carry-over of cognitive stimulation from the first group session. Similar findings of the superiority of group brainwriting in comparison to nominal brainwriting have been obtained in several studies using dyads (Coskun, 2005; Coskun and Yilmaz, 2009), in a series of studies using managers by Gryskiewicz (1988), and in a study in a high technology company (Paulus, Korde, Dickson, Carmeli, & Cohen-Meitar, 2015).
Paul,
Your comments on our post are extremely valuable, especially the information you’ve shared about your 2019 book and your 2018 Frontiers article on effective brainstorming and organizational innovation. Also, it was very helpful to learn about Ron Newman’s online platform for conceptual brainstorming. We had not been aware of these resources previously so we thank you for calling them to our attention.
For several years, I’ve used the idea sharing exercise described in our post as part of my Seminar on Strategies of Theory Development at UCI, to encourage graduate students to generate creative ideas as they create cross-disciplinary theoretical analyses of various phenomena. More recently, Maritza, Gary, Judy, and I have adapted the exercise for use in multidisciplinary centers at UCI to encourage connections between members’ different conceptual and methodological perspectives. What we’ve been referring to as the idea tree exercise, not knowing of Ron’s Idea Tree Framework for online sharing and integration of ideas, is a modest face-to-face exercise where individuals share and react to each others initial idea prompts, similar to the brain mapping strategies described in your recent book. Our small group brainstorming tool is perhaps more accurately (and modestly) characterized as “sowing idea seeds” that provide the basis for collective reflection and later conceptual refinement, rather than building out more fully-formed “idea “trees” with well structured branches.
It is always humbling to learn of one’s conceptual gaps and blind spots—but we’re certainly grateful to you for sharing your theoretical and empirical studies of effective brainstorming strategies along with Ron Newman’s research. Through the process of posting our article on i2insights.org, we have learned about your, Ron’s, and others’ approaches for encouraging intellectual synergy among research team members—for instance, the Triangulation Technique described by Machiel Keestra and the Mind Burst strategy mentioned by Charles Line in their comments on our original post at https://i2insights.org/2019/03/12/idea-tree-brainstorming-tool/; as well as Tony Buzan’s Mind Mapping approach.
Your and others’ analyses of brainstorming strategies will inform and enrich our future work with cross-disciplinary teams.
Thanks again,
Dan
Dan, Maritza, Gary, and Judith, thank you for sharing with us the concept of the tree idea exercise. This seems to be a pretty powerful tool that I will make sure to experiment in the future. I see it as an internet blog or forum that would have been condensed in 45 minutes. I can’t imagine what the result would be if the 263 authors who contributed to the i2i website would write a comment or ask a question about your blog post within an hour of its publication…
Christophe, thank you for your comment on our article and for suggesting the possibility of developing an online version of the idea tree exercise. That sounds like a fascinating possibility. I know there are many online crowd-sourcing platforms for creative problem-solving. See for example Michael Nielsen’s discussion of those in his 2012 book, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. A nice feature of performing the idea tree exercise in a face-to-face setting is that group members have the opportunity to reflect together on the ideas they’ve generated, once they’ve completed one or more rounds of brainstorming. They also can share their more general insights about the process of creating ideas collectively in real time. But I do think your suggestion of creating an online platform for the idea tree exercise should be explored further. Thanks again!
I have done a similar thing with groups (admittedly in a work and business setting) using the “Mind Burst” technique, which is influenced by Tony Buzan’s Mind Mapping approach. I describe it here: http://charlesmlines.blogspot.com/#!/2017/06/being-creative-in-times-of-turmoil-and_12.html at “3. Use practical and simple tools and techniques”. The technique does generate lots of ideas very quickly. But, as you say, there needs to be plenty of reflection and review to ensure not only new and innovative but also feasible and attractive ideas emerge.
Charles, many thanks for commenting on our idea tree post and for sharing your thoughtful and valuable article on “Being creative in times of turmoil and change”, which nicely describes your Mind Burst technique. I think it would be useful I think to compile a list or tool kit of various idea-generating tools, such as the mind-burst and idea-tree exercises and the Triangulation tool described by Machiel in his comment below that can be used to foster intellectual synergy in research settings. Your comment raises several important considerations, one being that the juxtaposition of divergent ideas doesn’t necessarily lead to constructive integration and conceptual progress. Sometimes team members’ efforts to integrate their disparate perspectives are halted when participants aren’t able to glean value from serendipitous pairings of dissimilar concepts and methods. Using brainstorming tools doesn’t guarantee that fertile, novel concepts and methods will emerge from those exercises, although we have seen instances where the idea tree has generated new approaches that the group decides are sufficiently novel and useful that members decide to further elaborate and refine the initial ideas. As you note, even when these tantalizingly novel linkages of disparate ideas occur, a period of collective reflection about their potential novelty and utility is needed to assess whether the team’s efforts to achieve intellectual innovation will be well-served by devoting additional effort toward the elaboration of those ideas. Also, brainstorming tools are but one strategy for promoting intellectual synergy in research and teaching contexts. They can be combined with other idea-generation strategies like scheduling team retreats devoted to creating and integrating new ideas; team discussions of relevant prior publications; and sharing team members’ entries from their respective research journals or “scholarly diaries”.
Many thanks for this post and this great ‘Idea Tree’ tool, which offers opportunities for divergent as well as convergent thinking in a team. It made me return to a tool I (as many colleagues) often use for generating an idea via convergent team thinking, which is a Triangulation exercise where team members individually write down a small semantic web of topics of their interest, then together check for potential overlaps and in a further step individually generate concepts/ideas related to one or more of those overlaps. In addition to your brainstorming application, I can imagine that this Idea Tree could add to Triangulation’s results, offering after such Triangulation a way to allow some more convergence and specification of individual contributions to a chosen topic. Finally, I appreciate the reference to the metacognition blog I wrote, thinking that the Idea Tree could even play a role in it, e.g. using it for articulations of the ‘team mental map’ (distributed expertise, project contents and goals, etc.).
Thank you Machiel for your comments on our idea tree post, and for sharing the information about your Triangulation exercise for fostering convergent thinking in research teams. I think there is great potential for combining the Triangulation and idea tree methods with additional strategies for promoting intellectual synergy in teams, such as the scheduling of team retreats devoted to developing and integrating ideas, regular meetings for collective discussion of relevant scientific papers, and the sharing of team members’ entries from their individual research journals. We would be very interested in learning more about your and your colleagues’ experiences using these methods either singly or in combination with each other to facilitate development of novel conceptual and methodological insights.
Anil, thank you for your kind feedback on our Idea Tree post. We hope you will have occasion to try out the exercise in a cross-disciplinary research or educational setting, and we welcome your reactions to how the exercise works in practice, in whatever contexts you’re able to use it!
Wonderful “tree idea” generation process during brain-storming or think tank sessions among cross-disciplinary members. This crucile of novel innovative idea concept generation development process needs to include “ranking and sorting” at the end of the 45 minutes excercise to identify the most feasible and most effective efficient strategy, tactics that would yield the profound impact in any given situation or problem area with “out of the box” thinking and solutions worth further delineation and follow through by all participating members in this excercise. Brilliant thought provoking “tree idea” concept where everyone can contribute equally and in a mutually respectful manner.