ABSTRACT
The Rice Storm is very popular in Japanese organizations. It is a technique for making decisions through consensus, and for securing group commitment and team cohesion. The Rice Storm begins when the group leader identifies a problem area (e.g., issues arising from setting up a new job rotation system in a department). Each participant is given a pile of index cards and asked to write down all significant facts pertinent to the problem, with one fact on each card. The participants are reminded to disguise their handwriting, so that the author of each fact will remain anonymous. The leader collects all the cards and redistributes them. Next, the leader randomly draws a card and reads it aloud. In response, the participants go through their own pile of cards, select the cards that relate to the card that was read, and read them to the group. The leader places all the related cards into a pile and invites the group to summarize its essence and labels it. The process is repeated until all the cards go into one of the labeled sets. Next, the process is applied to bring all the labeled sets into a single, all-inclusive set. Finally, the group summarizes the all-inclusive set and labels it. The description and label of the all-inclusive set become the group’s consensus definition of the problem.
