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STEP TWO: CONSENSUS

Quantity isn't everything, though. If quantity was all you needed, the football team with the thickest playbook would take the Super Bowl every year, and the companies with the biggest R&D; departments would be the consistent market leaders. That's not the way it goes down.

So, after you've enabled your team to generate as many ideas as they can in a given period of time, the next step is to narrow them down. In our productivity seminars, you do that by interaction that leads to Consensus.

The way we use the word. Consensus means "coming to general agreement." You don't get Consensus with a command type of decision-making, where the team leader says, "Here's how we're going to do it," or, "Thanks for your input; now here's how we're going to do it." You don't get it with the delegation type of decision-making, where the leader says, "Joe, you've heard what everybody has to say; now, you decide."  And you don't get it by voting.

This last point deserves special emphasis because people frequently confuse Consensus with voting. That's natural in a democratic country, where "agreement" is usually taken to mean what the majority wants. In spite of the problems involved with this type of decision-making (such as what happens to the wishes of minorities), it still seems about the best way ever devised by human beings to run their political affairs. But it's no way to run a business, because it can bypass one of the most valuable aspects of Creative Problem Solving - the synergistic interchange of ideas that leads to solutions which are "better than the sum of their parts."

It's all right to use voting in the preliminary stages of a Consensus decision-making meeting to narrow down a long list of choices. Generally speaking, if you've Brainstormed twenty ways of solving your spoilage problem, people who are aware of the problem will be able without too much disagreement to focus in on the half-dozen or so reasons that most obviously impact the problem. If you can't do that - and if you can't do it in a quick straw ballot - then you probably haven't Pinpointed your problem clearly enough in the first place. But once you've gotten your "possibles" down to the top six or eight, it can be disastrous to choose a final solution by a show of hands. Not only will you be likely to ignore good ideas by doing this, but you'll also inevitably slight someone's contribution, creating ill will and a feeling that your call for "any ideas at all" was just an empty gesture.

The way to get people really Involved in the final solution, and the way to generate the most creative of solutions, is to insist that all of the six or eight "best choices" be reasonably considered and discussed, with reasons being given pro and con for why each one should be adopted. If Ryan's solution to your spoilage problem is the least popular of the top six, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the worst choice. In the Consensus part of your Creative Problem Solving meeting, you should ask Ryan to explain logically and fully the rationale for his solution, so that everyone can assess its relative value.

In other words, you're going to be asking Ryan (and the team) to think vertically. I'm not contradicting myself. Once the Brainstorming session is finished, you've got to start focusing on the most "logical" choices. You need vertical, "reasonable" assessment to do that properly. There's nothing wrong with vertical thinking; it's just limited as a generator of possibilities. When you're down to the best-of-five, vertical thinking is just fine.

So get Ryan to defend his views. And get people to listen to him. Remember that, in managing a Brainstorming session well, you want to "facilitate" the momentum of the team's thinking by reinforcing participation and demotivating those who make judgments. Facilitating in the Consensus stage is just as important. The goal is not to create a contest between possible solutions, but to get people to agree on a solution that is least offensive to each of them personally and most effective as a joint resolution.

The clients who attend our seminars find it useful, when they're trying to focus in on the best choices, to ask themselves two questions. Once you've got your list down to five or six, go through each one in turn, and ask yourselves as a group:

1.   What's urgent, and can it be handled by this solution?
2.   What's possible given our current resources?

In other words, you try to find out for each "possible" whether or not it can reasonably be expected to fulfill your priority needs right now.

There will be disagreement on this, of course. One technique we've found to be useful in clarifying the issues involved, and not getting tied up in personality dissension, is to make a simple "Pro and Con" chart for each of the solutions proposed. At a recent seminar where machine downtime was being addressed, for example, the managers came up with four possible solutions that could, and probably should, be implemented to tackle the problem. One of them was "repair of the aging armature assembly." Everybody agreed it should be done, but there was considerable resistance to having it done now because doing so would put the armature out of commission for at least three days. It was a classic Pro-Con problem, so we advised the managers to make up a two-column chart to help them visualize it better.

On the left-hand side of the chart, they listed the "Pros" of fixing the armature assembly immediately. These "Pros" included such items as "better production capability," "better quality," and "less aggravation among line workers." The right-hand column included only one item: "cost of immediate down-time." And so they were left with the question: Was the benefit of better production, better quality, and less aggravation worth the price of three days lost production? When it was set up that way - as a kind of cost-benefit ledger sheet - the problem seemed much more clear-cut, and the managers were able to address their dilemma in a much more Pinpointed manner.

Another advantage of using this kind of Pro-Con listing technique is that it enables you to compare choices that you might not have thought of comparing before. It enables you, in other words, to ask questions that might not otherwise have been asked. Here's set breaking again. Suppose a financial officer in your company, as a member of one of your team meetings, is strong for Choice #4 because the financial Pros of that choice are overwhelming. Nobody else likes that choice, because it would upset their departmental routines. Solution: look at the financial officer's Pro list and ask, "Are there any other choices we have identified that might fulfill Finance's Pro reasons for wanting Choice #4?" Saving the good half, again. Searching for the best course of action with the fewest of negative consequences.

Whether or not you can get Finance to abandon his favored position, you will at least get him to investigate the other choices again, with an eye to seeing whether or not something he never considered can satisfy his Pro reasons for Choice #4. Writing down and exchanging ideas on Pro-Con reason sheets is a valuable cross-fertilizing technique. It creates the attractive possibility that, once every team member seriously considers other people's choices, you may together come up with sound hybrid solutions.

Another advantage of having team members list reasons for preferring certain solutions and having them assessed in terms of Pro-Con balance sheets is that it helps you avoid what we have sometimes called the Influence-Accuracy Tangle.

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