ThoughtStream: Local innovators capture the wisdom of groups in a new "community learning" tool
By Andrew Bennett
Its ancestors were decision-making tools for management consultants, but now ThoughtStream has evolved into a broadly applicable, collaborative software that groups of any size can use to merge many people's ideas to answer difficult questions, identify priorities, and more—all using technology that's as simple as email.
The brainchild of Rossland's Jim Firstbrook, ThoughtStream recently won "Most Innovative Company 2012" in the once-every-four-years Spirit of Innovation awards put on by the Kootenay Association of Science and Technology. We met with Firstbrook, the company's CEO, and Mike Kent, a former youth worker who is now a community learning consultant for ThoughtStream focusing on sales to school districts in BC and across Canada.
It can take a moment to grasp the idea behind ThoughtStream, but once you do, the far-reaching potential for business, government, and non-profits is clear. For now, however, Firstbrook and his crew are focused on helping school districts engage communities to address challenges such as school closures, the blurry lines of parents' versus teachers' responsibilities, and adapting to a changing world.
There are essentially three steps:
1. Share thoughts
The approach begins with “whole communities," for example, everyone from students to superintendents in a school district. The facilitator comes up with one or a few open-ended questions and sends these out in an email to the whole group. She might tack on attachments, such as a video or document, to help give context to the question.
Each email recipient takes a few minutes to follow a link to a ThoughtStream webpage to give point form answers to the questions. There's room to elaborate on a point too, for those who are inspired, but there are no logins or passwords; you just click a link and type each idea separately, as they come to mind. Save your answers and you’re done.
"We try to keep our participation dead easy," Firstbrook said. "The key thing for participation is to keep the barrier low," Kent agreed.
2. Converge thoughts
In what is admittedly the longest and most involved step, though aided by continual improvements in the software, the facilitator "converges" the many responses, lumping similar answers together until she's left with a final list of all the responses. She sends these back out to the group.
3. Choose thoughts
In this second round of email, each recipient has a handful of stars to assign to their favourite responses for each question. Those familiar with dotmocracy will recognize this step. Stars can be assigned however the recipient likes, from giving them all to a single, favourite response, or spreading them out.
The facilitator's job is easy now: the software just adds up the stars and the top responses to each question are immediately identified.
Community learning versus surveys
Firstbrook calls it community learning: “It’s a method of resolving challenges by engaging stakeholders on a local level in an educational process that develops independent thought into shared understanding."
Kent explained that community learning goes deeper than simple "engagement," and contrasts strongly with surveys. ThoughtStream forms a bottom-up, collective understanding of an issue by drawing together many responses to open-ended questions, where surveys ask pre-determined questions with limited latitude for responses, so surveys risk overlooking important issues.
"If I send you a survey and you do it, really you're doing it for me," Kent said. "Whereas when you use ThoughtStream, it's a way for people to engage and come to a shared understanding."
"Surveys," Firstbrook said, "are mostly answers on scales from one to five and things like that, but they will often come back with thousands of comments in the comment boxes." These textual comments often get ignored because surveyors do not know what to do with them, so they either ignore them or amass them in a large text document, he said. "We only ask textual questions," he explained.
Participation
Another important difference from surveys is uptake. It seems people are more likely to respond to a thoughtstream because there are fewer questions, and they can answer each question however they like.
"We have a school district now doing 18,000 parents in 5 thoughtstreams," Firstbrook said. "Last year they did a survey, but only got 100 responses. [With ThoughtStream] they're already close to 1000 responses."
In Rossland, the manager of the Sustainability Commission, Ann Damude, recently used ThoughtStream to ask 300 people to chime in about "family friendly" issues in town. Right away she had about 100 responses. "That's way more input than they expected," Firstbrook said.
The thorn in the side of most meetings—poor attendance—can also be rescued by ThoughtStream.
"To get parents out to a PAC [Parent Advisory Committee] meeting is really a challenge," Kent said. "It's not that parents don't want to go, it's just hard to find the time." Taking a few minutes to answer an email, however, is another story.
"What's happening now, and turning out to be really successful, is parents sending out thoughtstreams to parents," he said. "A chair of one PAC in the Vancouver area recently sent out a thoughtstream and, within 24 hours, had received 300 thoughts back."
Kent went on, "What I really want to see is students engaging students. So stay tuned, I think it's going to happen."
Local and global priorities
Firstbrook and Kent both emphasized how the bottom-up approach of ThoughtStream quickly highlights locally important issues, but can also be combined at district levels or higher to identify more global priorities.
Nanaimo's school district became the "posterchild" for ThoughtStream when it recently used the software to form a strategic plan for 42 schools. Each principal sent out a separate thoughtstream to their students’ parents, rather than a single thoughtstream from the school district.
"It's about relationships," Kent said. "If Karen Lavender [the principal of RSS,] sent me an email, I would respond differently than if [the superintendent of SD20] Greg Luterbach did. I don't know Greg, but I know Karen really well."
By starting small, locally important issues don't get lost in the mix, Firstbrook said. After converging and choosing at the school level, responses were merged and new choose steps were run at higher levels until the school district was left with the top priorities overall, in addition to local priorities.
Price point
There's a price advantage too. The software, even when coupled with ThoughtStream's full facilitation package, can still be much less expensive for an organization than hiring a management consultant who uses survey tools.
Firstbrook said a private school in Ontario wanted to do five parent engagements, but the school was quoted $80,000 by a management consultant. "We came in and quoted substantially less than that, including facilitation," he said.
Brainstorming
ThoughtStream all began back when Firstbrook was sitting at board meetings as brainstorm sessions plastered the walls with yellow stickies that got moved into similar ideas and finally voted on. He was also influenced by brainstorms that used whiteboards and flipcharts.
Now he and his team have developed a tool that uses a similar approach but can be applied on a much larger scale. And it can come right back to the boardroom and improve those brainstorm sessions too.
"Normally you have that flipchart paper and it sits on someone's desk for a month waiting to be typed in," Firstbrook laughed. Now, instead of someone writing points on the whiteboard, flip chart, or yellow stickies, the ideas can be typed directly in, perhaps to be viewed on a projector.
ThoughtStream is potentially even more useful before such meetings, or before conferences, to "front load" the discussion, he said.
"If it's sent out to conference participants before a conference, it can actually be used to frame the conference discussion," Firstbrook explained. "They can say, 'this is what you guys all thought coming in,' and maybe even ask again as a follow-up. We're getting real interest from conference organizers as a neat add-on."
Hard calls
Kent gave the example of groups faced with contentious decisions, such as school closures. If parents are asked beforehand to thoughtstream the pros, cons, and other issues surrounding a school closure, Kent said, it can make a potentially difficult meeting more productive. "Instead of having the superintendent tell the parents, 'these are the reasons to close the school,' he can say 'here's what you said, and here's what everyone voted were the top benefits and the top challenges.'"
Kent said this is what is meant by shared understanding. "It helps smooth those meetings and really be able to discuss the key issues, instead of somebody standing on their soapbox and taking the opportunity to rail on the system," he said.
Independence
The advantages of ThoughtStream over other means of group decision-making also include a certain objectivity over boardroom methods or townhall meetings. Firstbrook explained using hiring as an example, an activity that the company now aids with their own software.
"Normally what you do after an interview is sit around a table and do a wrap-up meeting," Firstbrook said. "Somebody goes first, and they'll say something like, 'I really liked him and I thought this was really good, and I didn't like this.' The next person will say, 'Yeah, I kind of feel the same.'"
"Now, we're careful to not say much about our opinion of candidates," he said. "It's much more impartial. We call that 'independence.' When you enter your thoughts, you don't know what anybody else is saying. When you enter your vote, you don't know what anyone else is voting."
History of the business
This "Most Innovative Business" is very young, making their first sales in 2011, so they're still operating at a loss. But, having raised some $1.5 million from investors, Firstbrook is confident the company is going to break even next year as the trend takes hold.
Firstbrook was working for Creo when it was bought by Kodak and incorporated into the graphic arts division, but in 2007 he left and came to Rossland to start a company. In 2009, he and a partner began a management consultancy, hatched the ThoughtStream idea, and started coding the software.
In the meantime, film went out of style and Kodak sank. "There were a lot of Kodak employees on the street with severance cheques who were willing to take a risk," Firstbrook said. But by 2010, the decision-making system they'd developed to be used in management meetings had got them a grant total of "zero sales."
Firstbrook's partner moved on as the company changed course, focusing the software on community engagement instead, on "how people felt about the process," he said.
"There was an instantaneous effect," Firstbrook recalled, reporting five sales right off the bat. "We've been growing steadily since." They began with BC school districts and have since expanded across the country. While recognizing the broad utility of his tool, Firstbrook plans to work on one niche at a time.
"You need to have a must-have, not a nice-to-have. You need something people desperately want," he said, summing up his market philosophy.
"In terms of a competitor, there's no one we've found out there doing exactly what we do," he said. "There's a pile of stuff like dotmocracy and a bunch of companies doing various flavours on the survey stuff. But we haven't found anyone doing what's done at meetings all the time—that is, thoughts through a focus. That's still unique as far as we know, which is pretty amazing. Partly we're too small for anyone to notice."
"We would love to have a competitor," he continued. "It would validate the market. Right now we're this lone voice on the benefits of community engagement and community learning."
A license to use ThoughtStream can be bought online for individuals or organizations, and the company also offers a full range of services from coaching on using their products to full-fledged facilitation.