Meta Planning – An Effective Group Brainstorming Tool

You are a consultant or a manager faced with a pressing issue that you want your team/client’s input as a group, to explore root causes of the current situation, or ideas for resolving the current situation. What do you do?

You can always throw in the issue as it is and solicit feedback. Well, it may work, however , chances are: the starting point can be sluggish as people struggle to gather their thoughts, there can be some people with strong opinions and others shy to share, input may not be captured
in an organized way, or simply it is too dry of an approach and not fun!

Alternatives?

There are a variety of structured brainstorming tools and techniques out there to take advantage of that will encourage group participation in an organized fashion and fun way.
One of these tools that we have used in various occasions and was extremely effective is ” Meta Planning”. If you take my word for it, you would be curious how it would work.

How it Works
Gather the group in a comfortable setting, a meeting room with chairs and tables arranged in a semi-circle will be ideal. The circular arrangement will allow people to be facing each other while focusing on the main board or the presentation screen.

Carefully prepare your questions to solicit the right response. “What do you think of the current situation?” will be obviously vague. Whereas, “What are the main causes that are contributing to decreasing customer satisfaction?” will likely focus the response of the participants.
Distribute several (A5 – 5.83’’X8.27’’) cards along with markers. Instruct participants to write a thought or response per card and to fill as many as they need.

Give sufficient time for participants to think and write down their thoughts. Then, collect the information. You can do this in one of several ways. You can either take the cards and start “arranging” them on the board (we will come to the arranging part in a bit). Or, start by one person in whatever order you like and read the thought, ask if others have similar ones. Go on a round until you have collected all thoughts.

Arranging and Posting Cards
Now, this is the most beautiful part! Take each card reading it loud, then “post” it on the board. You can use either pins on a soft-cloth board, or simply use scotch tape. There are some commercial systems out there, but expect them to be a bit expensive. Your call!
Post another card either in another “area or column” if it was a new thought, or in the same area/column as similar ones. Keep doing that until you exhaust all cards and take a look at the board now!

The board should show clear patterns and clusters of thoughts that contribute to the issue discussed. You can actually go ahead and summarize the themes of each area for further analysis.

To summarize …

Meta-Planning is a collective group effort for brainstorming a defined issues to solicit feedback from all participants.

Tools
• A good number of A5 cards. My rule of thumb is 10 per participant per question.
• Markers (you can use whiteboard markers)
• A board (a wall can do as well)
• Pins or scotch tape
• Facilitation skills
• A willing group to participate!

Advantages
• Each member participates in the session
• No dominance by a few members
• Participants commit to the outcome as they helped it in creating it
• Ideas are visually shared and can be physically moved around the board
• Helps break the ice
• It is fun!

Disadvantages
Ideas expressed are bounded by the experiences and ideas of the participants, so it may not be totally effective when deep business/technical expertise is required and it is not present within the group. For example, if you are planning on optimizing the financial structures of a business and the audience is not financially-oriented

Last Word of Caution
You have taken some valuable time of the participants, so on moving forward you need to leverage their ideas or act on at least some of them. Otherwise, they will quickly become disengaged and may not support similar efforts in the future.

Have fun Meta-Planning!