Do Something With The Post-Its!

How to not gatekeep group genius

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If I could bottle the feeling of generating wild ideas alongside other people, I would. There is nothing like it. The pause at the start when a prompt is first given, everyone chewing it over, then the flow of good thinking trickles and floods. It can’t be helped; one idea begets another, more generates more, and a collective high settles in. The pile of sticky notes expands like a realtime monument to the wisdom of a group.

It is why we rush to this format. It feels like tapping the source. A brainstorm! Let’s do a brainstorm. And they’re easy enough to organize, all it takes is getting a group of people together to ask: What books should we read? What could make our block more connected? What type of spring programming should we do? How can we make the volunteer experience better?

But what comes after is harder: sifting and synthesizing, going through the notes and photos or screenshots, souping it all up into something else presentable and actionable for the group.

Days pass, and if it isn’t something we do for paid work, probably weeks. Often no follow-up happens at all. Those who gathered in the initial brainstorm recall it with the infirmity of piecing together an alien abduction. Oh yeah, what ever happened there? Jo was there too right? And Paul? There were snickerdoodles? Weren’t we supposed to come up with some plan, or I don’t know, next steps?

I am able to recreate this conversation in such gripping detail because I have been the failed organizer, sitting four feet away, breaking out in a sweat over my failure to follow up.

In the famed Marge vs. the Monorail episode of The Simpsons, a charismatic salesman comes to town and cons the entirety of Springfield into paying for a monorail that will ultimately be faulty to the point of disfunction. He stirs a whole town meeting into a frenzy where they break out into song. But this is what he does; thrilling town meetings, moving from town to town with a briefcase full of cash meant for something the people will never see. This is about what I feel like when I do nothing with the post-its.

me escaping with all the post-its i have not done a thing with (thank you to kyle for helping me nail this meme)

This is the central deception of the brainstorm: it can be the easiest format to organize and the toughest one to actually do something with. It feels higher stakes than just a one-on-one conversation or co-creating with others because it is. We’ve just generated all of this idea energy but constrained it to one dimension: a post-it. By default, this saddles the facilitator as the sole gatekeeper to what happens next.

Brainstorms are not bad, but they are just not always the low-effort, perfect first step, just-get-something-on-the-calendar format they are framed to be. We make an implicit agreement when we come together to brainstorm: ideas are shared and something will be done with them. So when that half of the deal isn’t held up, a feedback loop is broken. The group misses out on the opportunity to see their wisdom reflected back at them so we all might do something with it. At best, momentum is lost. At worst, trust is broken.

Fail to follow up enough times, and this is how we stunt the power of a group.

When I organized a community design learning cohort with my colleague and beloved pal Ariana, we had one unbreakable rule: Do something with the post-its. Anything. As we co-created the very structure of the learning group with its participants, this constant feedback loop was crucial. We would try to do it within a week if possible, the constraint of this time being a helpful reminder to get on it but not overdo it.

And maybe there is a very good reason we feel we can’t do something with the post-its: we overextended ourselves and won’t have time to lead in the way we hoped, we’re just not that into the idea anymore, we found out someone else was doing something similar and didn’t want to step on it. That’s fine. Some of this is more likely to happen when we move too quickly. But we can still do something with the post-its. At minimum, they might be excellent compost for someone or something else. Don’t have the capacity to take this forward? Maybe one of the contributors or another emerging group would love to. Sharing the fruit from a brainstorm is making group brilliance open source.

The idea is to not gatekeep.

Like with everything, it’s possible we do nothing with the post-its because we are too daunted by the ideal ultimate end product. But there are many other shapes of “doing something” – here are some I’ve tried from least to most intensive:

• Send any follow-up to the group – even if you have nothing synthesized to share yet. This is basic, sure, but at least it acknowledges evidence that a group of people indeed came together and did something. And because there is so much “material” from a gathering, maybe we share something other than the ideas: a recipe for the brownies baked, the tools used, booking information for the venue where we gathered, the music that was played, the quote shared at the start. This can “buy some time” (but meant to sound less like a heist than this) and nurture trust while synthesis happens.

• Offer to connect people with each other. Go to the source of the ideas themselves! The humans who had them! If participants consented to sharing their information, this is another way to not gatekeep the gathering.

• Share back the literal image of the brainstorm. Yup. That quick picture of the wall covered in post-its you snapped while still talking to someone. The link to the digital workspace. It’s unorganized and raw, but better than nothing!

• Pull a few headlines. Maybe these were high points of the discussion or many-of-the-same post-it you can see at a quick glance. This has the most risk of bias from your perspective, but at least it’s something.

• Alchemize the ideas into a different medium. If the idea of synthesizing a long, written document of next steps is daunting, I find it motivating to consider different formats. Did we generate a bunch of local partner ideas? Make a spreadsheet with links. Event themes? Pull some images together that reflect ideas shared and show what it could look like in practice. Record yourself talking through the high points. Ideally there is still some “raw” way participants can see the text of their ideas, but synthesis can look like many different things.

• Full synthesis and next steps. The most intensive step is to translate all of the ideas generated into themes, resources, and proposed next steps that others can take forward.

There are so many ways to ease the work of this: co-facilitate with others, invite a small group to synthesize with you, delegate discrete chunks of the brainstorm to others, and best of all: ask the group to synthesize while you’re still in it. This is ideal, though I find it is often hard to make time for this while trying to squeeze in the most ideation possible. It isn’t just about saving us work later on, but democratizing the very summary of what was generated.

And if you look at all of this and flinch, maybe this is a sign. Maybe a brainstorm is not the best way to begin because it does generate a lot of responsibility when following through to the end.

Whenever we do choose to pull together all this collective genius, we should be ready to do something with it. To do anything less is to fumble the gift of the group.

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