A wall can be full and still hold fewer options than the same people would have written without speaking. If you are about to book a session whose middle is that conversation, ask whether anyone will write before anyone talks.
Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe, at the University of Tübingen, tested whether a talking group is the productive way to have ideas. The paper is Productivity loss in brainstorming groups, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1987. Alex Osborn had claimed in 1957 that, if the usual rules are followed, the average person can think up twice as many ideas when working with a group than when working alone. Against 22 experiments, eighteen found that people working alone, with their ideas pooled afterwards, produced more than groups that talked. The four that found no difference were studies of pairs.
What actually cut the count
They tested three explanations. Free riding is hiding inside a group score. Evaluation apprehension is the fear of looking foolish. Production blocking is the rule that only one person speaks at a time. Scoring each person's own contribution raised the count and did not close the gap. Alone versus together accounted for 83.46 percent of the variance, and the assessment instructions for 7.75 percent. Making evaluation feel more likely did not explain why the talking groups fell behind. They never put all three causes in one design, and a laboratory may not match a real meeting. Even so, the type of session kept the largest share of the difference.
Read the experiment that changed the waiting rule before you approve an agenda. People who could speak as an idea occurred produced about twice as many as people who had to wait. Waiting-side group totals were 55.67, 37.67 and 45.67. Without the rule they were 102.67 and 106.00. Ninety-six percent of the variance between conditions sat on that contrast. Hearing one another, or not, did not lift the count while the rule stayed. Talk filled 73 percent of the time, and people in both setups said the time was enough. The loss was not a shortage of airtime. Develop ideas alone, then use the group to evaluate. Production is the individual pass. The group cuts.
Where a tool sits in that hour
The study has no tool that drafts options for the room. The mechanism is the waiting rule. A tool that fills a wall for the room to discuss has done the production the individuals did not do. If nobody wrote a list first, the meeting is about someone else's options. If people must still wait their turn to say what they wrote, the blamed rule is still in the room. Use the tool after the silent pass, as material to cut, not as a substitute for the pass. The talking format still did not deliver the doubling Osborn had promised.
A weak agenda names the hour as a group conversation, invites a tool to generate the starting list and leaves the only individual act as a vote. People should write, then read the lists, then cut, including the tool's suggestions and the favourite of the most senior person. What the team should hold at the end is a separate question. This one is whether the options were produced under the rule the evidence says is the weaker one.
Collective Campus is building high-performance culture and teams for the AI world. The AI design sprints workshop is for a team that can name one question and will write before it talks. When that format is the right purchase, and when a course is the better one, is in when an AI design sprint is the right workshop. What the team should carry out is in what an AI design sprint should leave you able to ship. How one corporate team runs the work is in how a Melbourne team runs an AI design sprint.
What to bring
Bring the question in one sentence, and a rule that people write before they speak and before a tool speaks for them. If the room will not cut a senior person's favourite, the evaluation half of the hour has nothing to decide.
