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62 Serious Incident Prevention

I believe I understand your point of view; and
Whether or not I prefer this decision, I will support it, because it was
arrived at in an open and fair manner.

Some teams avoid trying to reach a consensus because they perceive it
will take too much time. This effort to shorten the time required to reach de-
cisions often backfires with the lack of consensus adding substantial time
to the implementation phase for new initiatives. Reaching consensus can be
expedited by team participation techniques, such as brainstorming and
methods for screening and prioritizing ideas generated by brainstorming.

Brainstorming Techniques

Teams often fail because input in team meetings is limited to a select
few—perhaps the leader or other influential or verbose members. Effective
brainstorming techniques help ensure input from all team members in gen-
erating potential solutions or other ideas for improvement. Brainstorming
also helps the creative process flow and helps ensure a high level of synergy
is achieved.
Effective brainstorming requires adherence to the following principles:

Present the situation to be brainstormed, and then allow “think time”
before proceeding.
Make sure everyone understands there will be no criticism of ideas
as they are generated.
Proceed one person at a time around the room, or in an alternate
manner that ensures everyone genuinely feels an equal chance for
participation. To help ensure broad participation, individuals should
provide only one item during each turn before proceeding to the next
person.
Record all ideas. Avoid the tendency to debate ideas as they are gen-
erated.
Continue rotating the opportunity to provide input until several team
members start to “pass” on their turn. Then open the process to free-
wheeling—additional ideas generated by any member in the room.
Keep the brainstorming process active until a large number of ideas
are generated. Giving up too early is a common mistake. Quite often
the best ideas come toward the end when team members must be
more creative in identifying additional ideas not yet on the list.

Teams sometimes make the mistake of trying to eliminate brainstormed
ideas as they are generated, based on the misguided thinking that keeping