It's Countdown to the 2020 Summit where 1000 delegates will break up into groups for 10 brainstorming sessions on various topics from Productivity, the Arts through to the Health system. The summit topics (www.australia2020.gov.au) can be found on the Australia 2020 website.

That would seem to imply that there will be 100 delegates in each session.
It will be interesting to see how such large groups will achieve tangible outcomes in one weekend.

I have done some research on the current thinking on brainstorming sessions and have been quite interested in the results. Whilst there is still a huge pro-brainstorming culture prevalent , I quote a few examples below which bring into question the process:

From Frans Johansson's book The Medici Effect:

Brainstorming [is] used in nearly all of the world's largest companies, nonprofits, and government organizations. And the reasons seem obvious...

"The average person can think of twice as many ideas when working with a group than when working alone."

... But is it true?

In 1958... psychologists let groups of four people brainstorm about the practical benefits or difficulties that would arise if everyone had an extra thumb on each hand after next year. These people were called "real groups" since they actually brainstormed together. Next, the researchers let "virtual groups" of four people generate ideas around the "thumb problem", but they had to brainstorm individually, in separate rooms. The researchers combined the answers they received from each [virtual group] individual and eliminated redundancies... They then compared the performance between real groups and virtual groups...

To their surprise, the researchers found that virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups.
The result, it turned out, is not an anomaly. In a [1987 study, researchers] concluded that brainstorming groups have never outperformed virtual groups. Of the 25 reported experiments by psychologists all over the world, real groups have never once been shown to be more productive than virtual groups. In fact, real groups that engage in brainstorming consistently generate about half the number of ideas they would have produced if the group's individuals had [worked] alone.

In addition, in the studies where the quality of ideas was measured, researchers found that the total number of good ideas was much higher in virtual groups than in real groups.

From the Wall Street Journal

....Teams aren't necessarily so great. "There are so many things people do in management because they think it's good, but there's no evidence for it," says Paul B. Paulus, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. "Teamwork is one example. Brainstorming is another." Prof. Paulus conducted research on the number and quality of ideas of four people brainstorming together versus four people brainstorming by themselves. Typically, group brainstormers perform at about half the level they would if they brainstormed alone.

That's why if you don't carefully follow procedures, you risk wasting a lot of energy. "If you leave groups to their own devices, they're going to do a very miserable job," says Prof. Paulus. But if people brainstorm alone after the group brainstorming session, it can be productive, he says, adding,

"It's ironic: You tap the benefits of groups alone. Everyone still presumes the best brainstorming is group brainstorming."

David Perkins, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, warns that sometimes group sessions can result in one person's bad idea tainting and limiting the range of others' ideas:

"The best way to get good ideas is to get people to write them down privately and then bring them in," he says. You want group diversity but no more than five to seven people or you risk ending up with "coblabberation."

"If you stand back and think about (brainstorming), it's plainly inefficient," says Prof. Perkins. But, he says, "sometimes you take the brainstorming approach because you want everyone to feel they have a voice."

That shouldn't be confused, though, with actually having a voice, says Christopher Holland, a policy analyst for the Australian government. "These things are usually designed to give people the idea that they have input into decisions when the decisions have already been decided."

and as usual The Onion provided an amusing take

CHICAGO - In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

"On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced," said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. "While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don't have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them."

In 2002, Fultz's team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and dumb questions during question-and-answer sessions.

One of my best experiences was in small groups where we all had the same topic, but each of the groups were composed of the same skill bases eg product people, technical people, finance people and sales people. The results were amazing. Maybe the 2020 should do the same, have Economists talking about Creative Australia and Scientists talking about Communities and Families.

We have all been involved in brainstorming sessions... what advice would you give to those arranging or attending 2020 to get the best results? What do you think of brainstorming?