By Dick Mooney

Becky and I received an email from Ralph Fowler early in June in which he described a brainstorming session at his group to get answers to the question, "If money and time were not a consideration, what would you like to see our support group accomplish?"

As Ralph reported it, the three "rules" of the session were:

• Anything goes. No project, program or idea should be left out.
• Criticism of an idea is not allowed in any shape or form.
• State your ideas as quickly as possible and don't think about them.

The result was a list of 60 ideas. And as Ralph said, "It was fun!" He concluded, "Holding a brain storming session has some big advantages. It gets people involved, it insures their input, and it insures we are doing what needs to be done."

Ralph is right, of course, but I realized that there is a fourth "rule" that shouldn't remain unspoken. I remembered this from a brainstorming demonstration I once witnessed during a workshop on effective communications. The workshop leader started out by asking the group to throw out ideas for what they thought could be accomplished in the workshop. He cited essentially the same ground rules Ralph noted and he said, "just throw out your ideas and I'll write them on the board."

What he did, but we didn't realize it until later, was mentally to divide the group into thirds. In response to every idea the folks of the left side of the room threw out, he enthusiastically said, "Great idea!" or "Wonderful!" or "Okay!!" and he rushed to the board to write the idea down.

To the people in the middle of the room he responded with something like, "Well, maybe," or "Yea, I guess that's an idea," or "I suppose," and he moved hesitantly to the board to write it down.

To all the ideas thrown out by those on the right side of the room, he responded negatively, saying things like, "No, I don't think so," or "That's really not a good one," and he didn't write any of these on the board.

Well, it wasn't more than a minute until the folks on the right side shut up completely. The ones in the middle hung in there for a while but they soon became silent too. But the people on the left side were still slinging ideas out five minutes later!

His point, which we soon figured out, was that to make brainstorming successful, every contribution-even the ones that seem "mediocre," and "poor"-must be positively reinforced. Why do we want to reinforce those? Beside the fact that we can't possibly instantly evaluate them reliably as poor or mediocre and that we know a good idea can often be synthesized from two bad ones, it's because someone who comes up with a so-so idea one minute may come up with a great one the next minute and we can't afford to dry up any of our sources.

So the fourth brainstorming "rule" is for the leader: "Every idea must be positively reinforced."