Production Blocking – Pill 006

Generating ideas is not easy, especially in teams. Even if it is been proved that teams are more creative than individuals, there are some pitfalls related to idea generation within teams.

In particular I’d like to discuss about Production Blocking and Evaluation apprehension

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Lets take the example of a team doing a brainstorming about developing a new car focusing on different domains. Chassis, engine, design, and steering. What happens when a team member shares his or her idea, for instance, on the steering of the car? Person A was generating ideas about the chassis. But, he gets interrupted by Person D who shares his or her idea on the steering. The consequence is that Person A starts thinking about the steering of the car instead of of the chassis and eventually, everybody is looking to steering and we may miss a lot of good ideas concerning chassis, engine, or design. This is very likely to happen. Research on this process, which is called production blocking, shows this process is very harmful it diminishes the amount of ideas as well as the quality of those ideas that a group generates.

There are a lot of useful tools that can be used to prevent Production Blocking. I’ll discuss them in others Pills.

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