OK, either Ron’s hit his stride or I started listenting. Four ideas.
1. a meeting of people charged to come up
with good ideas will come up with fewer good ideas that the same people
asked to go to their offices, come up with good ideas and come together
to share them. ‘If you respect the read-think-write cycle, the number
of ideas goes up by 40%. And it’s import that you write, not speak —
as in the traditional ‘speak-promote’ cycle.
2. Groups – at least highly effficient groups – tend to know who’s good at what.
3. The half life of groups — effective peaks about half way through
their life, and again just before their end of lifetime. (Obviously for
groups with a defined lifetime.)
4: HEGs know what doesn’t fit. His example: The Crying Indian pollution
ad was highly memorable but only 1% effectuve at changing behavior. A
positive remake was 40% effective — but the environmental groups that
funded it wouldn’t pull it… because the first one SHOULD have worked!
Q: Metrics of efffectiveness? Number of ideas isn’t particularly interesting
A: The other metrics we want to use is divergent thinking. Has been
used with Supreme Court decisions. Assumption: more divergence is
better, IFF people have to come up with a decision (which the Supreme
Court does).
I’d like to see ideas, divergence, conversion, implementation AND achieving desired results with minimal side effects.
Ron’s IdeaTree software – a combination or mind mapping, visual
blogging, annotatting relationships – focuses on ‘how ideas relate’ by
displaying the relationships among the nodes. Unfortunately he’s
demoing this with a thin gruel of content, conveying nothing
compleelling about its potential. At least not to me.