Brainstorming
After reviewing more than 1,000 brainstorming sessions, Dr. Paul Paulus, director of the Group Creativity Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington has found that what groups intuitively do is seldom effective, and often worse than the individuals working alone. However, groups that do it right can get tremendous increases in effectiveness. There are several deceptively simple methods which dramatically improve results, such as enforcing the "look/think/write" cycle, enabling anonymity when desired, mixing group and individual work, and structuring for surprise. The first method alone has improved results by 40% in studies. IdeaTree implements these principles with the added leverage of Internet connectivity for groups that are difficult to bring together regularly because of schedules or distance.

Divergent Thinking
Highly productive groups know how to deal with stuff that doesn't fit. Rather than ignoring or suppressing it, they say "maybe we have the wrong mindset", and a paradigm shift occurs. Group dynamics play a key role in enabling such shifts. It may seem obvious, but subtle psychological inhibitions, "if I say this it will create work for me", "I'm only a junior member", have a dampening effect. In addition, groups almost universally waste a large amount of time fielding and defending opinions rather than discovering new connections between novel ideas, resources, and knowledge. Yet sidestepping these pesky problems is not that hard if you leverage group dynamics to advantage.

The Half-Life of Groups
The best ideas don't surface early in a session, when everyone is fresh. Rather, they tend to come at or near the end, after the participants have generated lots of other thoughts. Productive work tends to start at about halfway through the life of the group, because the first half was spent 1) establishing informal trust and 2) learning who knows what, both of which are crucial to effectiveness. IdeaTree proposes to kick start things earlier by facilitating these two functions.