I’m planning to teach a seminar on political psychology early next year at UATX. One of my goals is to make the seminar useful for students who end up in organizations, including businesses. The idea is to have each student plan and lead one brainstorming session over the course of the term. There would be a session on each major topic in the syllabus. Some of the topics are mentioned in The Social Code, and others have been mentioned on this substack.
In business, a problem might be a product that is not performing as well as hoped, or a project that is faltering. The purpose of a brainstorming session is to try to get at the causes and possible solutions. A subtle purpose is to increase everyone’s commitment to constructive and pro-active behavior.
In the course, we might have complex issues. Perhaps the effects on political psychology of social media. Or the gender divide in politics, which in recent years has been getting more pronounced among younger people. The purpose of brainstorming is to organize various hypotheses about the issue. A subtle purpose is to encourage students to learn how to lead a productive meeting.
For the latter sort of topic, ChatGPT recommends concept mapping.
Basic process:
Start with a focus question (e.g., What influences people’s political ideology?).
Generate key concepts (gender, personality traits, social identity, media, values, etc.).
Arrange them visually — most general/abstract at the top, more specific lower down.
Draw labeled links between concepts (“influences,” “is shaped by,” “correlates with”).
Revise iteratively as new insights emerge.
My experience in organizations is that these sorts of formal procedures get people more engaged than just having a professor stand in the front of the room and ask for “class participation.”
We used brainstorming in my engineering teams all the time. One big and usually understated key is we forced people to get up out of their seats and move. We set up stations around the room with the key questions either on white boards or big sheets of paper with huge stacks of post-its nearby.
It's very, very easy for someone to sit at the conference room table and only make a half-assed effort to come up with and/or evaluate ideas. But standing up, next to a colleague, with the focus question on the wall in front of you, gets an order of magnitude more attention, energy, and good results.
In my business career we used brainstorming, so here are some lessons learned to supplement the basic process: [a] like most group activities, control domineering by individuals; everyone must participate, [b] your class will get better at brainstorming as they do it more, [c] collect all ideas at the outset of a session without filtering; that is to say, don’t get trapped in evaluating each idea as it’s suggested or you’ll never finish and people will hesitate to volunteer ideas if they are immediately judged – as a later step, after all ideas are collected, then evaluate feasibility, effectiveness, etc. of each, [d] the solution phase must consider how “action-able” solution ideas are; thinking of forces for and against, costs, complexity, etc. It will be interesting to hear about how it goes.