The challenge of convergence

There is a need for most facilitators to consolidate a great volume of ideas generated with Ventana's GroupSystems brainstorming tools. It is easy to generate ideas with great speed, but far less easy to bring them all together-a process called convergence. Traditional use of GroupSystems tools suggests that groups first brainstorm ideas using the Electronic Brainstorming (EB) tool, then organize these thoughts into categories using the Categorizer (CA) or Idea Organization (IO) tools, and finally they rank/order/vote the final categories to prioritize and achieve consensus. This paper presents an alternative sequence, in the context of what the author calls the group process: diverge (brainstorm or collect ideas); converge (consolidate, or make some sense of the ideas); evaluate (typically vote in some fashion); debate or lobby (to gain a better understanding), and finally organize the results (to develop presentable output).<>