I think your suggested format is a significant upgrade on the (much more common, unfortunately) “group brainstorm” set up that Ollie is criticising, for roughly the reasons he outlines; It does much better on “fidelity per person-minute”.
Individual brainstorming is obviously great for this, for the reasons you said (among others).
Commenting on a doc (rather than discussing in groups of 6-8) again allows many more people to be engaging in a high-quality/active way simultaneously.
It also seems worth saying that choosing questions well, which means they are:
worth answering
difficult or contextual enough that multiple people’s thought is required to get to a good answer
scoped well enough that progress can actually be made by a group in the relevant time
is a) necessary for group discussion to be worthwhile, b) difficult, and c) significantly more difficult for a group of mixed ability and context, whom you don’t know well. c, of course, applies much more strongly in the context Ollie is primarily concerned with (EAGs and similar events), to the one you’re describing (research team meeting).
I think that, almost without exception, if event sessions want to incorporate some discussion, they should start with the ‘individual silent thought’ exercise you mention, and then expand to pairs (with some 3s to stop people needing to do a lot of rearranging odd numbers of people). There are lots of reasons that this works better than larger groupings, but again Ollie’s heuristic of ‘fidelity per person-minute’ is one. A less obvious one is that minimising the distance between speaker and listener allows conversation volume to be much quieter, and if you think about how volume scales with distance, this more than outweighs the effect of having more people talking simultaneously.
Feeding back to the whole group from these discussions can happen (and be great), but is worth parallelising where possible, e.g. by commenting on a central gdoc as you suggest, or with a Slido, where people are encouraged to submit questions that their paired/small group discussions did not resolve, which the facilitator can then answer, or suggest steps to answer, at the end.
*I spent a ~decade as a teacher, and have facilitated many highly-reviewed workshops during and since, so I feel like I do have reasonable grounds to claim authority, but this is a joke, it just seemed like a funny epistemic status.
[Epistemic status: argument from authority*]
I think your suggested format is a significant upgrade on the (much more common, unfortunately) “group brainstorm” set up that Ollie is criticising, for roughly the reasons he outlines; It does much better on “fidelity per person-minute”.
Individual brainstorming is obviously great for this, for the reasons you said (among others).
Commenting on a doc (rather than discussing in groups of 6-8) again allows many more people to be engaging in a high-quality/active way simultaneously.
It also seems worth saying that choosing questions well, which means they are:
worth answering
difficult or contextual enough that multiple people’s thought is required to get to a good answer
scoped well enough that progress can actually be made by a group in the relevant time
is a) necessary for group discussion to be worthwhile, b) difficult, and c) significantly more difficult for a group of mixed ability and context, whom you don’t know well. c, of course, applies much more strongly in the context Ollie is primarily concerned with (EAGs and similar events), to the one you’re describing (research team meeting).
I think that, almost without exception, if event sessions want to incorporate some discussion, they should start with the ‘individual silent thought’ exercise you mention, and then expand to pairs (with some 3s to stop people needing to do a lot of rearranging odd numbers of people). There are lots of reasons that this works better than larger groupings, but again Ollie’s heuristic of ‘fidelity per person-minute’ is one. A less obvious one is that minimising the distance between speaker and listener allows conversation volume to be much quieter, and if you think about how volume scales with distance, this more than outweighs the effect of having more people talking simultaneously.
Feeding back to the whole group from these discussions can happen (and be great), but is worth parallelising where possible, e.g. by commenting on a central gdoc as you suggest, or with a Slido, where people are encouraged to submit questions that their paired/small group discussions did not resolve, which the facilitator can then answer, or suggest steps to answer, at the end.
*I spent a ~decade as a teacher, and have facilitated many highly-reviewed workshops during and since, so I feel like I do have reasonable grounds to claim authority, but this is a joke, it just seemed like a funny epistemic status.