Nominal Group Technique (NGT)

The nominal group technique (NGT) is a structured group meeting conducted by a facilitator. It has four steps: [Page 389]generating ideas, sequential reporting of ideas, clarification of ideas, and ranking of ideas by importance. One of the advantages of the technique is the involvement of stakeholders in the outcome of the process. The NGT assures that each person has an equal opportunity to express his or her ideas. It stimulates the generation of ideas through silent writing in step 1 and the round-robin listing in step 2. Each member is asked to list 10 most important ideas for change in the organization. Then, in a round-robin fashion, one idea from each member is posted on a flipchart for all to see.

Then the second idea for each member is posted and so on. This continues until all the ideas are posted on a wall filled with flipchart paper. So far there is no questioning of any idea. This prevents closure of ideas before all the ideas are equally considered. All participants can reflect on all ideas and have their questions and concerns addressed in step 3. Thus, in step 3 one can argue against any of the points but all ideas still stay posted on the wall. Then, each member or participant is asked to decide which 10 ideas are most important to him or her. In step 3 all participants cast a selected number of votes on the ideas listed. Usually 20 or so ideas are listed. Each participant then has 10 votes. Voting usually consists of putting a sticky dot (dot sticker) alongside the ideas you vote for. The members can only use one vote per idea. The result is a clustering around the most important ideas that the collective agrees on. This is visually seen immediately, because the red or orange dots are seen clustered. The ideas that got little attention just go off the agenda without much objection. Silent ranking, step 4, gives equal weight to each opinion during decision making and reduces peer pressure to support only one idea. Also, the NGT is cost and time efficient, because it gathers a lot of data in a short period of time.