It is designed to encourage each member of a group to contribute his or her ideas and to feel committed to the improvement process. This helps the group come up with many different ideas. The group members share their ideas and list them on a flip chart. This allows individuals to see others' ideas and helps validate their own ideas. The group discusses the ideas, which allows members to seek clarification, expand on their ideas or combine similar ideas.
Individuals display their rankings next to each item on the flip chart.
Allowing each member to present his or her opinion helps to validate ideas and will help gain buy-in. This structured process is critical and has been shown to be superior to conventional group discussion in terms of generating more and better ideas. Those serving deep in the trenches may actually have priceless ideas that no one has bothered to discover. The time required for the nominal group process is reasonable, but we modified the process slightly to make it more economical. Rather than conducting the entire process in one long meeting, we completed some steps on individual time.