The Most Useful Leadership Tool, Ever!
Nominal Group Technique: The ancient yet always up-to-date team process
Over the years I have trained thousands of team leaders and facilitators, ranging from school students to senior managers, working in education, industry, government, and community organisations. In all that experience, one of the best questions they ever asked was one of the earliest, the type of question so simple it cuts to the core of an issue. Although asked in many ways, at heart the question is this: What is the most useful tool for leading teams?
When leading or facilitating teams, a ‘tool’ is any process that guides people to a useful outcome, an answer they can use and share. While hammers are tools for driving nails and axes are tools for cutting wood, team tools are used for tasks like clarifying, assessing, analysing, organising, monitoring, and evaluating whatever the team is working on.
The first people to recognise these processes are tools, just like hammers and axes, were probably the Quality Management experts in the middle of the twentieth century, especially Edwards Deming and Kaoru Ishikawa. These gurus began talking about a bunch of simple tools any worker could use on almost any activity to improve performance.
Most of their tools were diagrams that made it easier to analyse and monitor activities, including bar-charts and run-charts. These ‘quality’ tools can be applied to sales, manufacturing, teaching, and especially management, and are so easy to interpret that even people who barely read can make sense of them. Using those tools created a quiet revolution, guiding the Japanese business recovery after World War Two, and helping innumerable other businesses transform themselves into world-beaters.
While the early lists from Quality Management had only seven tools, there are many, many more. ‘Brainstorming’ is one of the best-known of these, while Agile practitioners use Sprint Planning and Sprint Reviews. My own collection runs to more than 250 separate team-leadership tools.
For most purposes, that is far too many, so at most I’ve covered a dozen or so tools in my training workshops. Yet even that can be overwhelming for beginners, who have regularly asked which is the most useful, the tool that rules them all.
I remember my first answer, which I still think is right. It is possibly the oldest tool of all, with definitely the worst name — nominal group technique.
Despite its complicated name, nominal group technique is extremely simple: the leader asks a question, then team-members take turns to give one answer at a time, and repeating this process of everyone giving one answer at a time until everyone has shared all of their answers.
The question can be about anything — asking about the causes of a problem or its solutions, exploring opinions or describing experiences, are equally valid — but crucially, nobody may talk while others are thinking. After a few minutes, the leader asks each person to provide just one answer to the question. Usually, the leader records those answers on a board or screen where all can see. After each person has given one answer, the leader repeats the question before asking everyone for their second answer. This process is repeated for the third, fourth, or however many times until everyone has given all their answers.
That’s it. Nominal group technique is that simple.
So, what makes it the best team tool of all?
Everyone knows what it’s like when team discussions are dominated by people who are louder, more impulsive, or more powerful than anyone else. Anyone who feels shy or uncertain stays quiet, and their ideas are neither heard nor considered. The team is reduced to its loudest members because most of the wisdom in the room is hidden beneath those dominant voices.
But discussions can be dominated by ideas as well. You probably recall meetings where the first idea gets discussed to death, while other ideas are ignored. Usually that is because people feel they must follow what others have said, either from a sense of courtesy or because previous comments triggered similar ideas for them. If you’ve ever been in a discussion that repeatedly circles back on itself, you know the power of these dominant ideas and the frustration they produce.
Regardless of whether discussion is dominated by a few people or a few ideas, the result is the same: most of what the team knows or thinks remains hidden.
With simple questions, that matters little, but no-one needs to discuss simple questions. With complex questions, limited discussion means people mostly miss the best answers.
Nominal group technique solves this by addressing two problems. On the one hand, everyone has their say, even those who feel uncertain or shy; on the other hand, everyone listens to everyone else, even those who normally are too busy listening to themselves. Despite their value, these two things rarely happen in teams, let alone in committees or board-rooms. Nominal group technique ensures that everyone speaks and everyone listens, which is precisely why it works.
Yet nominal group technique is also incredibly simple, which means it rarely goes wrong. Bob Dick, who is the wisest facilitator I have ever met, describes some tools as ‘genius-proof’, because even geniuses find it hard to find ways to mess them up. Nominal group technique is the ultimate in genius-proof team tools.
But why the awful name? Back in the 1970’s, two bright researchers from the University of Wisconsin, André Delbecq and Andrew Van de Ven, were so impressed by this tool they thought it should be recorded in an academic journal. Although the tool already existed, it didn’t have an agreed name, but Delbecq and Van de Ven noticed this process depends on that pause where no-one can talk, when people think of answers on their own. While thinking by themselves, they are team-members in name only, so at that time they are only nominally a group, which makes this a nominal group technique.
So, the clumsy name is an accurate label for a simple tool. Unlike its name, nominal group technique is so simple and effective it would be amazing if no-one had thought of it before.
But of course, someone did. Many people did. It is quite possible that every culture on the planet has developed its own version of nominal group technique.
If you’ve ever been in a group where each person takes a turn to talk, then the person beside them and then the person beside that person, until everyone has had their say, you’ve experienced a variation on nominal group technique. That type of process is sometimes called a circular conversation (not to be confused with talking in circles), and versions of it are used by Indigenous cultures in Australia, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Another variation you may have encountered is the ‘talking stick’, which is an object passed from one person to another giving the bearer the sole right to talk while they hold it. Like circular conversations, this is an ancient and widespread process, while a more recent variation is the ‘standup meeting’ used in Agile and Scrum. People are constantly rediscovering this elegant tool.
Nominal group technique does have disadvantages, the main one being it becomes time-consuming with larger groups — but there is a solution. With large groups, people can be separated into smaller groups, then each of the smaller groups runs their own nominal group. Afterwards, each group appoints a spokesperson, who reports back to everyone, becoming part of a nominal group of groups. Once more, each spokesperson gives just one answer from their small group, then the next spokesperson, then the next, and so on.
Another potential downside of nominal group technique is it can be too effective, producing long lists of answers that are difficult to handle. In practice this is rarely a problem: people’s ideas often overlap and mostly do not report an answer someone has already given, making the total list shorter. Even when long lists do emerge, it’s a great problem to have because it shows the richness and diversity of people’s ideas, and long lists can be readily managed with tools for sorting or categorising.
You can use nominal group technique pretty-much anytime there is a question that lacks an obvious, simple answer. While Delbecq and Van de Ven wrote about using it with project management, I’ve found it helpful with problem-definition and problem-solving, team development and evaluating team performance. Others have used nominal group technique with negotiation and conflict resolution, where its capacity to get people to share ideas before jumping to conclusions is a major blessing.
In other words, if you have a difficult or challenging question to address, it is probably time to use nominal group technique. Give it a try — a nominal group might be the best group you ever lead!
