Run a brainstorming round under the four rules
kind: drill
Fifteen minutes, one moderator, one person writing on the board where everybody can see it. Topic: "something at this school that wastes people’s time every week". Afterwards, name the moment at which one of the four rules was broken.
Solution
The rule that breaks first is almost always "no criticism", and it rarely breaks as an insult — it breaks as "yes, but that would need the administration’s approval". Watch what happens in the next two minutes: ideas start arriving with justifications attached, and the wild ones stop.
The second observation is the production block. Only one person can speak at a time, so while somebody explains their idea, three others are holding on to theirs and forgetting them. That is exactly the weakness the next exercise removes.
Run one 6-3-5 round on the same topic
kind: drill
Six people, three ideas, five minutes, pass on. Do at least three rounds, then compare the yield with the brainstorming round above.
Solution
No model solution — but two observations are reliable. Round one produces the obvious ideas everybody already had; rounds three and later produce the ones worth discussing, because by then the obvious ones are used up and you are forced to build on what is on the sheet. If a round produces nothing, it is usually because people stopped reading before writing.
The comparison with brainstorming is the point of doing both: 6-3-5 produces more ideas per person and from more people, and the result is already written down. Brainstorming is faster to set up and better when the group needs warming up.
Build a morphological box for the lab-slot problem
kind: drill
Problem: lab slots are handed out on a printed sheet outside the lab. Build a morphological box with four to six characteristics, list three or four values per characteristic, and read out three combinations — one obvious, one that nobody would have proposed freely, and one that is nonsense.
Solution
One possible box:
| Characteristic | Value A | Value B | Value C |
|---|---|---|---|
Who reserves |
the student |
the teacher |
first come, first served at the door |
Where |
paper sheet |
web page |
phone app |
When it is decided |
a week ahead |
the day before |
on the spot |
Conflict is resolved by |
first booking wins |
the teacher decides |
a queue with priority |
Obvious: student + web page + a week ahead + first booking wins. Not proposed freely: teacher + phone app + on the spot + queue with priority — which turns out to describe a triage situation that actually happens before an exam week. Nonsense: first come at the door + a week ahead — the two values contradict each other, and that is the signal that the two rows are not independent.
The check on independence matters more than the count: if two rows constrain each other, the product overstates the number of real combinations.
Find an analogy in nature for a scheduling problem
kind: drill
Take "how do you distribute work over people without a central plan?" Abstract it into a functional question, find one analogue in nature, and say what the transferred principle would be — not the picture.
Solution
Functional question: how is work allocated in a system with no central coordinator and only local information?
Analogue: an ant colony. No ant has the plan; each follows local signals (pheromone traces) that are strengthened by success and evaporate over time.
Transferred principle: allocate work by local signals with decay — a task that nobody picks up becomes more attractive over time, one that is already being worked on becomes less so. That is a scheduling rule you can implement; "make it look like an anthill" is not. The abstraction step is the method.
Estimate one number Delphi-style
kind: drill
Everybody writes down, without discussion, how many hours the team’s first milestone will take. Collect the numbers, show the median and the spread, let the two most extreme estimators state their reasons in writing, then everybody estimates again.
Solution
The spread almost always narrows in round two, and the interesting part is why. The outliers usually knew something the others did not — a dependency, a piece of setup work, an exam week — and the anonymity is what makes it possible for a quiet team member’s number to change everyone else’s.
What must not happen is a discussion before round one. As soon as somebody says a number out loud, the rest of the estimates cluster around it, and the exercise produces the loudest person’s estimate with extra steps.
Produce your team’s candidate list
kind: project
From your own rounds — brainstorming, 6-3-5 and the box — write down the three candidates your team would actually be willing to work on for a year, and say which technique produced each.