Brainstorming

Useful brainstorming practices to fight biases and promote creativity:

- encourage dissent (different points of view are allowed to be expressed irrespective of expertise, position in the hierarchy, etc)

- use role-play (put yourself in the shoes of other stakeholders)

- used different recording methods (drawings, mapping, verbalising, etc as alternatives to conventional discourse)

- dialectic standard (use sequence of thesis, anti-thesis & synthesis)

- perspective taking (modelling other team members' assertions or beliefs into a plausible proposal; this involves understanding the assumptions implicit in the perspective)

- voting (each team member has the same number of votes on an issue, challenge, solution, etc; senior staff to vote last, as not to bias the choice of other staff members)

- solicit outside views (be careful of experts and people who are familiar with the topic; hold discussions with people with "good minds" from different disciplines)

(source: Charles Conn et al 2018)