Un:  Or what passes for work with this team.

Vulcan:  The Boss wants us to explain what the Mulling Team does.

Un:  Nothing.  Just mulls.

Engineer:  The job of the Mulling Team is to mull over problems and come up with ideas about solving them.

Un:  The Mulling Team leaves the problems unfixed. 

Networker:  Fixing is the work of other teams.  Mulling just gets ideas.  Like brainstorming.

Un:  But without the crowd.

Empath:  We are the crowd.

Vulcan:  We start with the general objective from the Boss. 

Hunter:  The objective is always to get ideas about solving a problem.

Vulcan:  The objective on this occasion is to explain what the Mulling Team does.

Canter:  You can’t say that the Mulling Team does anything.  It just gets ideas.

Un:  Ideas are not nothing.

Engineer:  Especially if you write them down.

Vulcan:  They become a list of ideas. 

Un:  The way to have one good idea is to have many ideas to choose from.

Networker:  The song of the Thinkerer,

Vulcan:  Or of anyone who knows the trick of producing many ideas.

Networker:  Mulling is one such trick.

Un:  Brainstorming is another.

Vulcan:  Irrelevant.  One is enough.

Un:  If it produces enough ideas.  Different ideas come from different viewpoints.

Engineer:  The Mulling Team has different viewpoints.

Un:  The viewpoints point in many directions.

Empath:  Some people feel that mulling goes nowhere.

Hunter:  It does get off track.  We try to keep the target in focus.

Un:  It is hard to mull and focus at the same time. 

Hunter:  Focus works best when you already know where you are going.

Un:  If you already know where you are going, you don’t need to mull.

Hunter:  If you need to mull, you don’t know where you are going.

Un: There is a time to mull and a time to focus. 

Networker:  And a time to know what time it is.

Un:  That time is always now. 

Idea Clipit
Thinking

Head Talk
Conversations in the head

Ideator
What's the big idea?

Problem-Solving
A problem lets you show what you can do.

Thinking Tools

Semi-Structured Brainstorming

Meet Your Head Staff

Mulling