Have you ever been in a meeting, and the boss says, “Okay, let’s brainstorm this,” and no one says a word. It’s even more noticeable on Zoom! At least in a conference room, you can hear the hum of the drink machine down the hall.
What’s worse? When it happens to you!
Research has shown that brainstorming doesn’t really work. For one thing, people spend much of their time in meetings talking about what they know rather what they don’t. It’s called the Common Knowledge Effect. Encouraging teams to ask questions, rather than present ideas, can help uncover unique knowledge and foster learning. This technique is called Question-Storming.
Question-storming provides a better alternative to brainstorming for surfacing new knowledge, especially true in Extreme Teaming scenarios. Leveraging the diversity of knowledge on a transdisciplinary team of subject matter experts can be the difference success and failure. Surfacing new knowledge, learning across domains of expertise, and opening new paths to explore are crucial. Question-storming can help to establish the team culture needed to address complex challenges. The table below lists extreme teaming leadership functions and provides examples of how question-storming might apply.
| Extreme Teaming Leadership Functions | Benefits of Question-Storming |
| Build an engaging vision | Uncovers differences in principles, thus helping to make values explicit |
| Cultivate psychological safety | Encourages perspective-taking as well as developing a learning mindset, which encourages respect and trust |
| Develop shared mental models | Helps in the co-development and understanding of shared mental models, uncovering assumptions |
| Empower agile execution | Exposes potential gaps between the work of sub-teams, minimizing issues related to hand-offs |
Now what? Want to know how to get started? There are multiple approaches to question-storming. One of the easiest ways to start is to simply replace a brainstorming session with a question-storming session. Test it and see if it works. Here are the basic steps:
- Provide a topic.
- Let the group generate questions.
- Share, summarize, and synthesize the output.
For additional information and step by step guidance and instructions, there are several great resources available online.
Max Jole provides a nice breakdown on one of his blog posts: Question storming: A guide for brainstorming questions.
Linda Naiman contributed a great article on Inc.com: Kickstart Creativity in Your Team With This 1 Simple Brain Jolt
For more background and nuances on how to approach question-storming, you may want to consider reading Fast Company’s article, How Brainstorming Questions, not Ideas, Sparks Creativity.
For more information on Extreme Teaming, check out this book: Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership.