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Brainstorm Like A Pro - Master Facilitation Skills
29 Plays20 days ago
Ever found yourself in a meeting where ideas flow endlessly, but decisions seem impossible to make? Or worse—someone reopens a discussion just when you thought a decision was final? In this insightful webinar, hosts Jake Blocker and Rachael Grail introduce Open-Narrow-Close, a powerful framework that streamlines group discussions and decision-making.
They’ll break down how structuring conversations into three distinct phases—Opening (idea generation), Narrowing (organizing and prioritizing), and Closing (final decision-making)—can keep your team aligned, engaged, and productive. Whether you’re leading strategy sessions, brainstorming new initiatives, or just trying to avoid meeting fatigue, this tool will help you make discussions more efficient and less frustrating.
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Transcript
Autumn Vibes and Thanksgiving Talk
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of Water Cooler Wisdom. I am Jake Blocker. And I'm Rachel Grail. Rachel, happy fall. Well, whenever this goes out, it's probably January or something, but happy fall now.
00:00:18
Speaker
It's so nice. There's some just, it's a kind of a misty foggy day where I am and the trees are all different colors. I love it. Cozy sweater, sweater with a, I got my cardigan on one of my mini. Um, yeah, yeah. Well, Thanksgiving is around the corner. And again, this is probably going to be happy new year whenever this actually goes out, but I'll ask a Thanksgiving theme question for our setting. What is your favorite Thanksgiving meal?
00:00:47
Speaker
Stuffing. oh yeah Yeah, stuffing. I don't even have to think about it. Stuffing all day, every day. Yeah. Yeah. You know, controversial. I'm not a big stuffing guy. I don't like it. Well, maybe just, you know, it depends. Some people call it dressing, some people call it stuffing. I find the tastiness of it is a broad spectrum. So if you've ever had my mom stuffing, you would probably love it. Have you changed my mind? Yeah. I've had some good stuff in the day because yeah, I feel like it varies if you, depending on the Thanksgiving you go to, it's different. All the items are going to change a little bit. You can't always trust the stuff, but it is in my world so good. What's your favorite? Like consistent, you love it no matter what. You know, something I always make for it is a sweet potato pie. So rather than a pumpkin pie, I go sweet potato pie, make it totally from scratch, everything. Of course. And it's one of my faves and anything sweet potato related. I like big sweet potato pie. I love that.
00:01:47
Speaker
I've got a friend, ah shout out to Uriah Duffy. he His birthday's in July, but he loves Thanksgiving meals. Like that's his favorite food. And so often for his birthday, he'll have like a full Thanksgiving dinner with his friends. And they always deep fry the turkey, which is like, don't try it at home if you don't know how to do it. Awesome. Well,
00:02:12
Speaker
Well, we have another.
Using Tools in Conversations Effectively
00:02:13
Speaker
for today i know yeah Perfect segue to our topic. Not really, but we'll make it work. ah cany ah yeah We can weave that in to the, my description of this tool.
00:02:27
Speaker
It's totally possible. Yeah. So we have another tool times, our second one. We are going to, to remind you, this is going to be, we'll have 10 minutes to go over a tool. Um, one of I is popular tools and Rachel is going to kind of lead the discussion on, on what this is and in 10 minutes. And yeah last time we just missed it, but I still gave it to you. The, we still did it. I, but you did advance stuff after, so I give it to you.
00:02:56
Speaker
I feel like we need to up the, up the the stakes here. I'm, I'm looking for a prize if I can make it in time. Yeah. I think it can happen. All right. So I'm going to set the timer or the stopwatch. So the tool is going to be open, narrow close and Rachel go. All right. So open, narrow close. We're not talking about a doorway here. What we're talking about is a way of thinking,
00:03:24
Speaker
about how a conversation moves from the beginning of the conversation through the different ideas that people have to offer to a decision. So, you know, this is not about when you're just trying to make a decision on your own. This is about when you're trying to make a decision with others. So when we teach this concept, we use this image of a diamond where the open is the first half representing divergent thinking, kind of generating ideas,
00:03:53
Speaker
um offering proposals, having a brainstorm, things like that. The narrow is a sliver of the second half of the diamond, where the thinking kind of begins to converge. You start to organize your ideas, maybe analyze the priorities. And then the close is the point of the diamond. That's where the decision has been made.
00:04:15
Speaker
So what's really powerful about this concept is that you start to realize there are different things happening in different parts of a conversation. Like I said, the open is about idea generation and clarification. For example, if you were with your family and you're trying to figure out what items you were gonna have for Thanksgiving dinner. You might say, okay, i um if you're some kind of family say, I have a proposal, let's not cook. Let's go to this restaurant that is open on Thanksgiving and we'll let somebody else handle it, right? So that's a very narrow opening as a proposal. Generally, we have slightly larger openings. You can adjust the aperture like a list. All right, let's make a list of all of the items that
00:05:04
Speaker
could be at Thanksgiving dinner or let's just brainstorm. Like maybe we want to get out of the box thinking and we don't want to have a turkey this year. We want to have a tofurkey or we want to have a ham or whatever it is. And so you want to brainstorm and just like blast open the thinking. So you can adjust the aperture depending on how complex the decision is, how much information you want.
00:05:29
Speaker
Once you've got all of that information, you wanna make sure that you clarify. Like somebody might say, I don't know what a tofurkey is. That sounds terrible. What is it? And then you describe it and they're like, oh, okay, I might eat that. It still sounds terrible.
00:05:45
Speaker
So, or like, what's a turducken, you know, if that's on the list. So you might need to clarify. The important part here is that everybody knows what you're talking about, because sometimes what I mean by an idea is not what someone else perceives. So you want to generate ideas, you want to clarify those ideas, and then you start to narrow it down. There's lots of tools. I'm not going to go into the teaching of all the tools, but there's lots of different ways that we can take the ideas that people have generated and start to get a sense for what the group is naturally inclined towards.
00:06:24
Speaker
um and And we can prioritize and say, okay, let's look at the group thinking here. What do we think? is it All right, let's go there. So we start to organize the information, prioritize the things that we have generated in the open. And then if you do that work well, you can close on a decision.
00:06:44
Speaker
The big idea about this whole thing is that your first priority should be for everybody who's involved in the conversation to know what stage you're in. What is the activity that you're engaged in in this part of the conversation so that everybody can be focused on doing that thing?
00:07:02
Speaker
because if we're getting close to a decision and someone says like, okay, well, it sounds like we've talked about it and we want these five things and that's all we can have because we don't have room on the table for more than these items. And then somebody else is like, wait a minute. What if we just actually like fly to Mexico for Thanksgiving?
00:07:24
Speaker
Right? And now you're back in the open and then everybody throws up their hands and they're frustrated because all the work has already been done. So you want to make sure that you do each process completely so that people can feel like, okay, we've we've gotten all the ideas out. We've organized the ideas in a way that starts to reveal the thinking about what people naturally prioritize.
00:07:47
Speaker
And then once we've done that, we can make a decision. That allows you to keep a group together and not have this like hurting wild turkeys sort of an experience. I'm just like holding onto this analogy till the end of time.
00:08:04
Speaker
So, you know, at its whole open, narrow close is about taking a group through a decision making conversation in a clear way so that everyone's working on the same space at the same time. Like I said, there's all kinds of different tools and techniques depending on how complex the problem is. And you might not go through the whole stages in one conversation. You might need several months to just open on ideas if you're, say, starting a new business and you've got lots of different complex things to generate. So there's no hard and fast rule for how long each of these spaces take.
00:08:44
Speaker
But the the main thing to remember is that know what it is that you're doing and communicate that to others so that they can be clear about what they're doing with you. Yeah, I love that because I think of, um you know, just today, I coincidentally, we did an open session with marketing content. And how you said, you know, you can divide it up over time. That's what we did. This today was just open.
00:09:08
Speaker
We came to the table with some ideas and going to share these ideas and then just focus on that today. Nothing else. Don't worry about narrowing. Don't worry about looking for duplicate ideas. Don't worry. Don't get too far into the weeds of what one idea is. Just let it all flow. You know, something else I mentioned is you can have people assigned to different pieces. So, for example, that maybe it's an entire team or entire organization, entire whatever it is, a larger group is responsible for the open.
00:09:37
Speaker
to bring together all these ideas. And then the agreement is that maybe it's three or so people are gonna be responsible for that narrow and closed portion. Right, right. What I love about what you just said is that when you say to people, we're just in the open, then it's like it frees up the thinking. People are like, okay, I don't have to analyze whether this will actually work. i don't i don't I'm not gonna decide on the solution.
00:10:03
Speaker
people naturally, I know I naturally have a tendency to jump to a decision and be like, Oh, well, great. That one sounds good. Let's do it before really thinking things through all the way. And that can be a real risk when you're, especially when you're in business, you're trying to come up with the best solution. If you don't allow thinking to be big enough, you might not come up with the best solution.
00:10:27
Speaker
yeah And i I love what you said about assigning different tasks to different people. There's so many different ways that you can do this. um You can generate ideas asynchronously and and so that people just kind of have some quiet thinking time on their own and then you come together and clarify and start to see if there are duplicates, um prioritize them, see where the group is kind of leaning towards in terms of things that are floating to the top. So there's there's ah there's a lot of different ways. It's a really flexible tool, but it's just it's a great way. When people learn this, they're like, oh my gosh, now I understand why all the conversations with my team go off the rails, and now I understand why my husband drives me up the walls. It's because he's always opening when I'm trying to close.
00:11:16
Speaker
so I love it. I talk a lot about these tools make the invisible visible. There's like these invisible things that are just happening in the way we work together. And when we have an understanding of the stages of conversation and how we're opening, narrowing, and closing on different ideas, it's like, oh, I i see the matrix, right?
Frameworks in Practice
00:11:38
Speaker
to Yeah. Well, you have a minute and about 15 seconds. Do you want to give one narrow tool? Just like quickly in a minute, give a narrow tool.
00:11:49
Speaker
Yes, I would love to give this tool, which we call N over three. um This is something that's a quick way of seeing the group thinking. It's like seeing where the group is leaning towards. And it's where you take all of the items on the list that have been clarified and and you've already like scanned for duplicates and removed true duplicates.
00:12:13
Speaker
They say, OK, we've got all these items. Let's figure out what's the top third that people um think are the the best things to move forward, the best ideas to move forward with. This is not making a decision. This is not a vote. This is just getting enough of an idea of what people are leaning towards.
00:12:32
Speaker
And so you take the whole number of items, you divide that number by three, and then you have people choose whatever, say we've got 12 items and we say, okay, divided by three, that's four items. Choose the four items that you think ah should be considered for the final decision. And so then people choose those items. You can record that in various ways, have people come up to a flip chart or annotated online or Write it down or share it however you want to do it logistically. But then you start to see, okay, there's some obvious overlap here. yeah You start to see the themes. And it's not a vote. It's not a said and done. no Nobody's making any agreements. Don't freak out. Your sweet potato pie can still come to dinner. But um but it's just it's a great way to start moving the decision along.
00:13:25
Speaker
Love it. Well, we went to 25, but that's fine. That was a set up. He just set up. I know I did that to you. I know. Sorry. Well, that was great. Opening our clothes is one of the most universal tools that literally anyone in the organization or any department can use and any scale to. And I will say we've been making a lot of choices in our company. We just had a two day leadership summit and we had a lot of information to sort through and a lot of things to decide on. And we used open, narrow clothes and it was just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. does us so much It was amazing. So it really allows you to get work done in a way that is organized.
00:14:11
Speaker
and rational and productive. It's like hallelujah. For someone that's a little bit of a creative thinker like myself, it's so nice to be like, okay, I can relax into the process. I know we're gonna move it forward. love Good plug for this tool.
00:14:26
Speaker
yeah I feel like there's one more thing I want to say since we're already
Team Dynamics in Decision-Making
00:14:30
Speaker
over time. yes yes okay If you're someone that's leading groups and you're interested in knowing on the personalities on your team, look out for the ah people have different sort of affinities for or preferences for one or the other of these stages.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, some people love idea generation. Some people are all about like organizing and and analyzing. Some people are just like, can we make the decision and move on. And so if you can start to observe this happening in your groups, you might see like, Oh, yeah, that person's a closer or that person's an opener. You want to make sure that You give everybody the time that they need to feel satisfied. Well, watch out for that because those people will not not intentionally not out of ah any malicious intent, but they will derail here your your decision making process just because of their own natural affinity for one or the other stage. Yeah, that's a good call. Yeah, because I know I'm usually eight let's just make the decision. I don't care. I'm done. Oh, really?
00:15:35
Speaker
okay i know know Those of you who can't tell that sarcasm in my voice, loving, loving, kind sarcasm. We all got to have our affinity towards something. And we got to have the closers. I mean, God bless them. And it's like we need every part. Everybody has a part to play. So yeah.
00:15:54
Speaker
Cheers to you. Well, thank you so much, Rachel. This is a great, another productive one. um Yeah. So we'll catch you next time. All right. See you at the water cooler. Thanks for listening to water cooler wisdom. This podcast is brought to you by interaction associates, a leading professional development and leadership training organization whose mission is to help people work better together.
00:16:21
Speaker
If you'd like to learn more, visit interactionassociates dot.com. If you have questions, comments, or are interested in collaborating with this podcast, you can email us at waterpolarwisdom at interactionassociates.com.