When it comes to brainstorming, questions have the potential to disrupt the flow of ideas. When one comes up, everyone zooms out from their individual mental flights and focuses on the question. This, in turn, typically leads to extensive discussion, and you can lose an incredible amount of your brainstorm time to unproductive conversation. Worse yet, all too often the question is not actually a question!
From our extensive experience in the innovation space, we’ve found that, more often than not, questions tend to be masked ideas. People wary of having an idea criticized couch their offers in the form of a question – “What if we…?” This not only has the aforementioned side effects, but can even result in the idea going unnoticed. It is our job as facilitators to pick up on when this happens, and then extract and capture the idea. This restores order to the group, and builds confidence in the ideator.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Front End of Innovation Blog: Killer Questions, and How to Get Around Them
