Brainstorming – Integration and Implementation Insights

Stakeholder engagement primer: 8. Generating ideas and reaching agreement

April 15, 2022December 2, 2021

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_8

What skills for generating ideas and reaching agreement should every researcher involved in stakeholder engagement seek to cultivate? What key methods and concepts should they be familiar with?

The focus in this blog post is on generating ideas and reaching agreement, as well as recognising the “groan zone” between these two phases in a group process. Researchers will have diverse attributes and not everyone will be well-placed to cultivate the skills described here. Having an understanding of the skills can help in choosing the researchers best placed to undertake the stakeholder engagement.

Generating ideas: Brainstorming

For brainstorming to work well, it requires rapid-fire contributions, no holding back or self-censoring of ideas, and no discussion or criticism of the ideas proposed. It often involves a group of stakeholders (or stakeholders and researchers) sitting around a flipchart or whiteboard, with one person writing down the ideas as members of the group say them.

Stakeholder engagement primer: 2. Identifying stakeholders

December 21, 2021October 21, 2021

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_2

How can all those who have something relevant to contribute to a research project be identified? In particular, how can we find those who, through their experience of being affected by or dealing with a problem, can provide:

a more comprehensive understanding of the problem
ideas about ways to address the problem
insights into how the research can best support policy and practice change on the problem in government, business and civil society?

A wide-ranging and inclusive initial process of identifying stakeholders ensures that key individuals and groups are not missed and that the broadest range of knowledge and perspectives is found, for both understanding and acting on the problem.

Idea tree: A tool for brainstorming ideas in cross-disciplinary teams

September 23, 2021March 12, 2019

By Dan Stokols, Maritza Salazar, Gary M. Olson, and Judith S. Olson

authors_dan-stokols_maritza-salazar-campo_gary-olson_judith-olson — 1. Dan Stokols (biography)
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.

Knowledge mapping technologies

November 30, 2022March 30, 2017

By Jack Park

How can you improve your thinking – alone or in a group? How can mapping ideas help you understand the relationships among them? How can mapping a conversation create a new reality for those involved?

In what follows, I draw on the work of Daniel Kahneman’s (2011) best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which explains how human thinking occurs at different speeds, from the very fast thinking associated with face-to-face conversation to the very slow thinking associated with assembling information resources into encyclopedias. I use those ideas in my descriptions of knowledge maps.

Three kinds of knowledge maps

Harnessing analogies for creativity and problem solving

September 30, 2021September 13, 2016

By Christian Schunn

What is an analogy? How can analogies be used to work productively across disciplines in teams?

We know from the pioneering work of Kevin Dunbar (1995), in studying molecular biology labs, that analogies were a key factor in why multidisciplinary labs were much more successful than labs composed of many researchers from the same backgrounds. What is it about analogies that assists multi- and interdisciplinary work?