Have you ever been on a large team, say 20 members or more, and the leadership put all of you into a room to brainstorm ideas? If you're like me, after participating in some of the idea-storming, you backed up to a wall in order to observe the chaos.

And what chaos it was! Some people were spitting out ideas faster than rain falls, others were saying, "We tried that already! It didn't work!" Some were saying, "People aren't going to be happy with that idea!" And still others were shouting, "That's just not logical!"

It's hard to get much quality brainstorming accomplished with such a large team! So how do you, as a leader today, harness the strengths of such a large team to get optimal results when you're starting at the idea stage for a new project?

This is one of the times that I like employing the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) assessment tool. The MBTI's results for a large team can be utilized to great advantage at the early stages of a project. Since a lot of people are somewhat familiar with the results of the MBTI, I'll give brief descriptions of where I'm going with this.

When you and your employees take the MBTI assessment, the result is a 4-letter code:

• The first letter (E or I) indicates extravert or introvert.
• The second letter (N or S) indicates intuitive or sensing.
• The third letter (T or F) indicates thinking or feeling.
• The fourth letter (J or P) indicates judging or perceiving.

When we're trying to brainstorm ideas and evaluate them effectively with a large team, we'll look at peoples' MBTI scores, but only at the second and third letters.

From the second letter, we take all of the people who are N's (intuitives), and put them in a room to get lots and lots of ideas on the table. People who are N's are typically great at generating a lot of ideas in short amounts of time. This is the first step for brainstorming with a large team. There is no evaluating ideas at this time, only idea generation.

Next, from the third letter, take all of the people who are T's (thinking), put them in a room with the list of ideas generated by the N's, and have the T's apply logic to all of the ideas that were brainstormed. (Since T is the third letter, some of these people will have been in the previous meeting, if their second letter is N.) This is the first step in evaluating the ideas, and the list will be whittled down.

Next, from the second letter, get all of your S's (sensing) in a room with the "whittled down" list and have them apply facts to the ideas that remain. They should ask, "Has someone tried this before? What happened?" They will weed out more ideas.

For the final group, from the third letter, get the F's (feeling) in a room with the latest list. This group will review each idea and ask, "How will this affect people?" They will get the list of ideas to become even smaller, or will at least put the ideas in the order in which they recommend implementation.

This is a great approach for brainstorming with a large team! Everyone gets to participate and everyone gets to use their strengths.

If you lead a large team and would like to use their individual strengths to great advantage for your project in the brainstorming and evaluating cycle, consider employing their MBTI results in this way. Leave chaotic brainstorming sessions in the past!

(See my other article about brainstorming titled "Make Brainstorming Work for You, Not Against You", also available through EzineArticles.com)

2006 Borgeson Consulting, Inc.