Organizing Ideas
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who divide everything
into two groups, and those who don’t.
Kenneth Boulding, Economist
ThinkTank collaborative meetings often generate more ideas than could be handled in a traditional meeting. Organizing ideas is an essential process in many collaborative meetings, especially as a prerequisite to evaluating ideas. There are many ways to do this in ThinkTank.
In a “same-time” collaborative meeting, participants enter ideas simultaneously, so some ideas may be duplicated. At the most basic level, editing and merging allows you to consolidate a list of ideas as part of verbal discussion.
Looking over the list of ideas may disclose common themes that can be used to group the ideas by categories. ThinkTank’s Categorizer activity includes an “Organize” mode that lets participants, if given permission, deposit ideas into one or more “buckets” to organize them.
Use the submission panel to create buckets or categories to further consolidate ideas into a more precise list. Then, tell your participants they can drag and drop an idea into the appropriate category. (You may need to change participant settings to allow them to move ideas into different categories). Note: When multiple users are moving ideas simultaneously, the first person to grab an idea wins.
Other ways to organize information include structuring information and establishing relationships. Categorizer allows you to indent and out-dent ideas to display inter-relationships and connections.
Another way to shorten the list is simply to vote on which ideas to keep. The leader can transfer a lengthy list of ideas into Alternative Analysis or Rank Order Vote, and participants can vote for their top ideas. A few clear favorites usually emerge; this enables the collaborative team to work with a more precise list of ideas.
Knowing how the ideas will be used can make it easier to choose an organizing strategy. The meeting sponsor can clarify how this activity fits into the overall meeting objective. Often common themes emerge while generating ideas, making it easier to define the organizing activity that is needed.