Saturday, August 23, 2008

Facilitation: 12 Principles of Process Facilitation - Principle 4: Ideas Generation

Hi,

This is Part 4 of the 12 Principles of Process Facilitation.

Today, every company wants more ideas from their people, but people are reluctant to give away their ideas.

The secret to ideas generation is "people needs ideas to trigger off more ideas!"

The more ideas are being thrown out, the more ideas are going to be thrown out.

Then, what triggers off the first few ideas will be crucial to any ideas generating session. When people are involved, they will talk about their points of view, which then stimulate others' thinking.

So, you first step to generate ideas is not generating ideas, but to get your people's participation. Do anything to make them involved and then request for their points of view about the subject. Then ideas will be coming.

Accept simple or even stupid ideas, particularly at the very beginning. These ideas stimulate generation of more ideas!

How to get your people participating? Let's discuss in Principle 6: Full Participation later.

Keith
Explore, Exceed & Excel