The Categorization Paradox

Working with groups to generate ideas, feedback, or objectives can be very stimulating, and prolific. I like to use an anonymous Decision Support tool in this phase, so everybody can contribute on a level playing field and without inhibition. The amount of ideas you can gather in a short period of time is tremendous. But then cold hand of complexity grabs hold...


Often times at this point there are a good many duplicate ideas, contradictory ideas, and ideas that are not very good or relevant. How can a group weed through these? There is such a wide range of opinions here. Here are a few that are hap-hazardly arranged in order of what I think to be least useful to most useful down at the bottom, commentary in italics:

• An expert - either an external consultant or internal authority - makes sense of the inputs and decides what the bigger picture is from their vantage point. The danger of bias skewing results is enormous, and this doesn't capitalize on collective intelligence, obviously.
• The group just takes the entire list of ideas and begins forming action plans with these in a self organizing manner. Inefficient, and just because an idea has been generated, does not a worthwhile idea constitute.
• The group tries to synthesize the information by looking for emergent themes, and sorting the ideas into the categories that they fit under. This can be done with the regular flip chart and post-it approach. Takes a lot of time. Once ideas are categorized, they are still physically dispersed, so there is often the need for some re-recording.
• The group tries to synthesize the information by looking for emergent themes, and sorting the ideas into the categories that they fit under within a decision support tool. Still takes considerable time, and can be a little painful. One way around this is to use a tool where people can list ideas and categorize in advance of the meeting. The categories are determined then by an algorithm being applied to the suggestions of the participants. One tool that does that is Open Source Decision.

Full disclosure: I'll be working with Open Source Decision and its proprietor Dan McLinden for a June meeting, and friend, mentor, and facilitator Rich McLaughlin on its implementation.

I think categorization is a necessary evil, but would love to prove myself wrong. Any good ideas to circumvent the step without compromising the sensible flow of information?