Coming up with ideas for any new marketing campaign is a difficult one. You pull together your team of creative geniuses and beerstorm, sorry, brainstorm, (beerstorming is a solely Wooshii phenomenon) all those thoughts and ideas you have. But how do you avoid groupthink?

What is Group Think?

sheep“The tendency for members of a cohesive group to reach decisions without weighing all the facts, especially those contradicting the majority opinion”

Simply put if you are working with a team on a specific project there can be an underlying tendency for the group to come to decisions based on preconceptions and shared knowledge. This maybe subtle or even sub-conscious. Janis Irving coined the phrase in 1972 and described how a group can make faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment”. In a creative environment that’s not good news. You need people to be, (dare I say it) “thinking outside the box”. Much easier to, (here it comes again) think outside the box when you actually don’t know where the box walls are.

The answer – Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a fabulous way to avoid groupthink. You can set some boundaries to guide a huge group of creatives and then set them to work independent of your main team. Ideas Bounty (see www.ideasbounty.com ) are doing just this for entire campaigns and have recently had their model verified by brands as big as Unilever, who dropped their agency in favour of crowd sourced creativity – see here.

With viral let me quote David Meerman Scott, (author of The New Rules of Viral Marketing)

“To minimize poisonous internal groupthink, invite people from outside your organization to help. Teenagers are especially tuned in to Internet trends and viral phenomena, so you might want to recruit some to help you come up with ideas.”

That is what is so great about Wooshii. It is full of creatives from a myriad of places, cultures and careers. It allows you to tap into an enormous creative user base vastly increasing your creative output and helps to minimise internal group think.

Would love to hear your thoughts on avoiding group think. What steps do you take, if you are working in a team, to minimise its effects?