Chapter 10 Leadership and Decision Making in Groups 289often enough by city sanitation workers, causing trash
overflow to be blown onto the beach by the ocean wind.
Generating Solutions
Once the EcoCrew team has identified and analyzed the
problem, the next step is to come up with a solution.
Susan starts asking for ideas from the group and writes
them down on a whiteboard to be evaluated later.
This technique, called brainstorming, encourages
members of a group to come up with as many ideas as
possible without judging the merits of those ideas at first.
The intent is to prompt fresh thinking and to generate a
larger number of potential solutions than a group might
arrive at if members evaluated each idea as it came up.
As the EcoCrew members throw out idea after idea, the whiteboard grows dense
and colorful with possibilities (see Figure 10.1).
Once the members have run out of new ideas, they’ll need to narrow down
the list. To help them focus on the one or two strongest ideas, Susan invites
them to define the criteria that eventual solutions will have to meet. First, Susan
reminds them that the primary goal would be to reduce litter on the beach.
Another member, Wade, then points out that at this point, the group has no
budget, so it needs to limit its initial efforts to tasks that have little or no cost.
Another member, Larissa, notes that because the group has a relatively small
membership, it should focus on things either that the group can manage on its
own or in which the group could encourage nonmembers to participate. The
group concludes that an acceptable solution must meet these key criteria.
WRITING DOWN any
ideas that your team has on
a whiteboard can be a great
way to get the creative juices
flowing. Punchstock/Getty ImagesFIGURE 10.1
SUSAN’S WHITEBOARD