I define a decision as the process of selecting one out of two or more alternatives.

In many cases, it can be valuable to put some work into generating as many ideas as possible. This is especially important for making decisions amidst disagreement — it takes some real creative work to find an idea that everyone will agree to.

In addition to finding creative ideas to reach agreement, you also simply want ideas that are good! If you are designing a technology, or planning a campaign, you don't just want to settle on the first viable idea that comes along. You want to push yourself and your group to come up with the best possible idea.

Colloquially, the process of coming up with ideas is known as "brainstorming." For design purposes, you must address two key tensions in brainstorming.

On the one hand, you want to maintain as much diversity as possible in your process — the more diverse your ideas are, the more likely you are to find a good one. If all of your ideas are very similar, you're not really exploring the possibility space. Thus, a good design practice might be to keep all of your group members isolated, so they don't start to herd together around the same set of ideas.

On the other hand, people inspire each other — we "riff" on each others ideas — once I hear an idea from you, it sparks an idea from me that I would not have thought about on my own.   So we don't actually want to keep people separate, do we? We want to keep them together, so they can bounce ideas off each other.

This is the tension you must consider in your design process — balancing diversity and creative synergy.

Another technique for generating ideas is crowdsourcing. The idea of crowdsourcing is that we can recruit members outside of a group to contribute ideas, often through a competition where the best idea gets a prize.

The advantage of crowdsourcing is that it puts a lot more people on the problem—and more people means more chance of finding a good idea. A very popular website for crowdsourcing is Kaggle.

One interesting idea I recently read (no link available) about crowdsourcing is that the type of feedback matters — sometimes, you might want to give feedback on the quality of the solutions, and sometimes you might want to give feedback on the way that people are designing the problem.   Each approach has different advantages.

These are a few examples of design principles you might consider, and we can discuss others.

With respect to developing your facilitation practice, I teach a very specific set of techniques for managing idea generation.