"That was a big focus group."
This comment was from Nancy Rosenow, executive director of Nature Explore, about a large-scale Brainzooming creative thinking session we designed and facilitated for its annual Leadership Institute.
A new type of focus group was what the large-scale creative thinking session was, even though it took place in the midst of a professional development conference.
The Case for a New Type of Focus Group
If you think about a traditional focus group, it's an odd environment.
You bring individual groups of recruited strangers together who share some common characteristics (usually including geography) to react to pre-developed ideas or concepts. While they may engage in a brief group activity about the concepts, the main communication is usually one person reacting to what the focus group moderator or another participant has said. That result is a lot of one-person talking, everyone else listening, and relatively inefficient learning experience.
At the Brainzooming sessions we designed and facilitated the Leadership Institute (and for a similar one the previous day for KC Digital Drive), we created a different experience for participants with varied strategic thinking exercises designed specifically for them.
While we had geographically diverse individuals working together in four-to-six person groups, there were nearly twenty of those groups active simultaneously. With no dedicated facilitators for the groups, we had had staff from the organization walking among the tables to answer questions and provide creative encouragement.
We accomplished this with a poster-based set of strategic thinking exercises. Participants could weigh in on three topics of interest to event organizers:
- What opportunities and challenges the attendees foresaw in creating and maintaining outdoor classrooms (the focus of the Institute)
- Attendee reactions nearly forty potential topics for educational modules
- Ways attendees would change their selected modules to make them more helpful
The net result a tremendous volume of input from the diverse participants, and all it took was approximately 45 minutes of event time for participants.
Strategic Thinking Exercises Designed for Broad Input
If you have a large group of your target audience members assembled, think about the value of a new type of focus group. You’ll get more people (who have both fundamental similarities and stark differences) working together, generating ample content through multiple periods of intense, collaborative interaction as they work on new ideas.
Sound intriguing?
Give me a call or email, and let’s discuss how we can make it happen for your organization! – Mike Brown
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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.
