Project management: should people think alone before designing together?
At the start of a project, a group workshop is often presented as the best way to broaden the range of possible solutions. The managerial question is more specific: should the process begin with discussion, or should time first be reserved for individual thinking?
What the literature establishes
Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe (1987, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show in brainstorming experiments that interacting groups generate fewer ideas than comparable sets of people working separately whose contributions are subsequently pooled. Their findings attribute a substantial share of this loss to production blocking: when one person speaks, the others cannot express their ideas simultaneously. Group discussion is therefore not a neutral arrangement for exploring solutions.
The value of an individual phase followed by group work
Karan Girotra, Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich (2010, Management Science) compare teams working together from the outset with a hybrid arrangement that begins with an individual phase before collective work. In their experiment, the hybrid arrangement performs better on several dimensions of idea generation, including the quality of the best proposals. The aim is not merely to increase the number of contributions, but to improve the chances of finding a genuinely promising option.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that design workshops should disappear; these studies do not establish that. Generating proposals, examining constraints and choosing a solution are different activities. For a project manager, the reasonable implication is to sequence these activities, not to replace all deliberation with a collection of forms. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings do not guarantee
These experiments concern idea-generation tasks, not the overall success of banking, commercial or industrial projects. A highly rated proposal can still fail when confronted with regulatory requirements, technical dependencies or insufficient resources. Simply counting ideas would therefore provide an incomplete measure: relevance and feasibility also need to be examined.
A practical check in Lugano
In Lugano, a bank, fashion business, trading company or Italian-speaking family SME could compare immediate discussion with individual idea generation in writing in Italian followed by discussion, using comparable design problems and keeping total time and team size equal. Before the trial, define criteria for relevance, feasibility and compliance, then have anonymised proposals scored by assessors who do not know which method was used. Measuring the number of distinct proposals meeting these criteria and the score of the best proposal would help establish a local benefit, without claiming universal superiority. In SHR's Project Management programme, this protocol can serve as an applied exercise: learning to structure the design process, then checking what that structure delivers. To go further: explore the Project Management training in Lugano in the canton of Ticino, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Project Management in Lugano
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