Nominal Group Technique: Steps, Examples, and When to Use It

By Linh Ngo · Updated Oct 12, 2026

The nominal group technique (NGT) is a structured meeting method in which a small group writes ideas silently, shares them in turn, clarifies them, and then ranks them by private vote. It produces a prioritized list that reflects the whole group, not just its loudest voices. Use it when you need many ideas and a clear decision in a single session.

Key Facts

• What it is: a four-stage group process of silent idea generation, round-robin sharing, clarification, and private voting.
• Origin: designed by André Delbecq and Andrew Van de Ven, and described in the 1975 book Group Techniques for Program Planning by Delbecq, Van de Ven, and Gustafson.
• Group size: CDC guidance prepares a room for five to nine participants, while a clinical-pharmacy review of the method recommends a maximum of seven.
• Output: a ranked list of ideas, with scores everyone can see and no one can argue was decided by rank or volume.
• Best for: prioritizing problems, causes, improvement ideas, criteria, or features when a plain discussion would be dominated by a few people.
• Weak spot: it suits one topic per session and gives little room to develop ideas in depth.

What is the nominal group technique?

"Nominal" means "in name only." The people sit in the same room, so they're a group in name, but for the first part of the session they work alone. The CDC's evaluation brief describes NGT as a structured variation of a small-group discussion used to reach consensus. A moderator poses a question, individuals respond, and then participants prioritize the ideas of all group members.

The point of the structure is to fix what goes wrong in ordinary meetings. A senior person speaks first and everyone else adjusts. Two people trade opinions while the rest wait. The first idea on the table gets debated for twenty minutes, and the idea that would have won never gets mentioned. The CDC brief says the process prevents one person from dominating the discussion, encourages every member to participate, and ends with prioritized recommendations that represent the group's preferences.

NGT has a documented lineage. Delbecq and Van de Ven designed the approach for program planning, and the full method was set out in their 1975 book with Gustafson, Group Techniques for Program Planning. Since then it has spread from program planning into health research, education, quality improvement, and product teams.

Why silent writing beats open brainstorming

Classic brainstorming rests on a claim from Osborn's 1957 book: that the average person can think up twice as many ideas in a group as alone. When researchers tested it, the result went the other way. Diehl and Stroebe's 1987 experiments, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, compared real brainstorming groups with "nominal" groups whose members worked alone and had their ideas pooled afterward. They found that production blocking accounted for most of the productivity loss in real groups.

Production blocking is simple to picture. Only one person can talk at a time, so everyone else is holding an idea in their head, waiting for a gap, and often forgetting it or deciding it's no longer relevant. NGT removes the wait. Everyone writes at the same time, so nothing gets blocked, and nobody has to be brave enough to interrupt.

Two other benefits matter in a business setting. First, ideas get written before anyone knows what the boss thinks. Second, the voting is private, so a junior analyst's top pick counts exactly as much as the director's. The CDC brief lists these among the method's advantages: it limits the power of opinion makers, reduces pressure to conform based on status, and typically gives a greater sense of closure than open discussion. If your meetings suffer from silence or deference, our piece on why teams stay silent in meetings covers the cultural side.

The four steps of NGT

The method is usually taught in four stages, which the clinical-pharmacy review calls silent generation, round robin, clarification, and voting. Here's how to run each one.

Before the session

Pick one question and write it so there is only one way to read it. "What are the biggest barriers to on-time delivery for our top 20 accounts?" works. "How can we improve operations?" doesn't. Decide who attends (people with direct knowledge of the problem), who moderates, and what the voting criterion is: most important, biggest impact, easiest to fix, or something else. Keep to one criterion per vote.

For logistics, the CDC brief suggests a U-shaped table arrangement with a flip chart at the open end, plus paper, pencils, and 3 x 5 inch index cards for each participant. A whiteboard or a shared document works just as well, and the same steps apply on a video call.

Step 1: Silent idea generation

The moderator reads the question aloud and also shows it in writing. Participants then work silently and independently, writing ideas as brief phrases. No talking, no comparing notes. The clinical-pharmacy review reports that this stage has run up to 20 minutes in published studies, though ten minutes is plenty for most business questions.

Step 2: Round-robin recording

The moderator goes around the group, taking one idea from each person in turn and writing it where everyone can see it. No debate yet. The CDC brief notes that you don't need to repeat duplicates, but if someone feels an idea adds a different emphasis or variation, it can go up. Continue until every idea is recorded. People can pass on a turn and rejoin later.

Number each idea as it goes up. You'll need those numbers for voting.

Step 3: Clarification

Now the group goes through the list item by item. For each one, the moderator asks whether anyone has questions or comments. The goal is shared understanding, not a vote on merit. The CDC brief adds a helpful detail: the person who wrote the idea needn't feel obliged to explain it, because any member can play that role. This keeps authors from defending their ideas and keeps the tone neutral.

At this stage, you can merge near-duplicates and reword vague items, but only with the author's agreement. Don't delete anything because it seems silly.

Step 4: Private voting and ranking

Each person privately picks their top items and ranks them. In the CDC's version, members select the five most important items, write one on each index card, and rank them, with the most important receiving a 5 and the least important a 1. The moderator collects the cards, has one person read out the idea number and points while the moderator records them, and adds up the totals. The highest-scoring ideas are the group's priorities. The clinical-pharmacy review describes the same scheme: scores are confidential, then summed and shared with the group.

If the top scores are close, or there's a big spread (one person ranked an item 5 while everyone else left it off), you can run a short second discussion and a second vote. That's a common variation, and it's how teams usually resolve ties.

How long does it take?

It depends on the size of the question. The published timings in the clinical-pharmacy review give a useful ceiling: silent generation up to 20 minutes, round robin and clarification up to 30 minutes each, and voting up to 10 minutes. That adds up to about 90 minutes of work for one question. For a tight business decision with six or seven people, plan 45 to 75 minutes, and budget more if you'll run a second vote.

NGT vs. other idea and decision methods

NGT sits in a family of group methods. The differences come down to whether people talk first or write first, whether the process is anonymous, and how a decision gets made. The table below compares it with its closest relatives.

Two comparisons deserve a closer look.

NGT vs. Delphi. The clinical-pharmacy review draws the line clearly: NGT uses face-to-face small groups and gives prompt results, while Delphi is a multistage, self-completed questionnaire with individual feedback and anonymous participants. The same review reports that Delphi was developed by the RAND Corporation in 1953 and that two rounds are typical. NGT's trade-off is that people must be in the same room (or on the same call) at the same time. Delphi's trade-off is that it can take weeks or months.

NGT vs. affinity diagram. They aren't rivals; they work well in sequence. NGT ranks ideas. An affinity diagram organizes them into themes. If you've collected forty raw ideas, group them into six or seven themes first, then run an NGT vote on the themes. The affinity diagram also appears in the seven management and planning tools used in quality work.

A ready-to-copy NGT template

Copy these two sheets into a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, or a shared doc. The first is the master list the moderator builds in the round robin. The second is the tally.

Sheet 1: Idea list

Sheet 2: Ranking and tally (each person scores their top five privately: 5 = most important, 1 = least)

Leave a cell blank when someone didn't pick an item. Total each row, then rank by total. Also look at how many people picked an item, not just its sum. An item with 14 points from three people who all ranked it high is a different signal from 14 points scattered across five people who ranked it low.

Moderator script (about two minutes)

1. Welcome the group, say why the question matters, and say how the results will be used.
2. Read the question aloud and show it in writing.
3. Announce the silent-writing time limit and start the clock.
4. Run the round robin: one idea per person, no comments.
5. Walk the list for clarification only.
6. Name the voting criterion, hand out cards or open the ballot form, and collect scores.
7. Read the top results aloud and agree on next steps and owners before anyone leaves.

Examples of NGT by business function

These are illustrative scenarios, not case studies. They show how the question, group, and criterion change by function.

A worked example makes it concrete. Imagine a six-person operations group asked why customer orders ship late. In silent writing they produce around thirty raw notes. After the round robin and clarification, the list shrinks to 22 items once duplicates are merged. Each person picks their top five and ranks them. "Manual re-keying of orders" collects points from five of the six people and finishes first. "Carrier pickup windows" is second. A lone "label printer downtime" scores high from just one person, which flags it for a follow-up conversation rather than a priority slot. The group leaves with three ranked items, an owner for each, and a plan to dig into the top one with a root cause analysis or a fishbone diagram.

When to use NGT, and when not to

NGT is a good fit when:

• The topic is a single, clear question.
• Participants have different levels of seniority or personality, and you want equal input.
• You need a ranked output, not just a discussion.
• A prior meeting on the same topic ended without a decision, or with one person's idea winning by default.
• You're building a logic model or a priority list. The CDC brief gives the example of a team whose list of outputs is too long and has to be prioritized.

Skip it, or pair it with something else, when:

• The decision needs deep analysis of trade-offs. NGT ranks, and it doesn't evaluate. For structured option analysis, a method like the Kepner-Tregoe method gives you criteria and weighting.
• You have several unrelated topics. The CDC brief lists as disadvantages that NGT requires preparation and suits only a single-purpose, single-topic meeting.
• You want ideas to build on each other. The same brief notes that NGT minimizes discussion and so doesn't allow full development of ideas, and can be less stimulating than other group processes. Run an open brainstorm first if you want energy and building, then use NGT to decide.
• The group is large or scattered across time zones. In that case a Delphi-style survey or a poll may serve you better.

Do's and don'ts

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

Starting with a weak question. A fuzzy question gets fuzzy ideas. Test your question by asking a colleague to answer it in one sentence. If they ask what you mean, rewrite it.

Letting seniority back in. If the most senior person announces their view before voting, the structure has failed. Ask leaders to speak last in clarification, and keep the voting private.

Skipping clarification. Two people may rank the same item high for different reasons because each read it differently. Clarification catches that.

Using too many ballots. Picking five from a list of ten is not much of a filter. If the list is short, pick three. If it's very long, trim it with a quick dot vote before the ranked vote.

Treating the result as the decision. A ranked list tells you what the group thinks matters. It doesn't replace analysis. Use it to decide where to look first, then validate with data. A Pareto analysis is a natural next step when you have numbers behind the problem.

Running it remotely without adjusting. Use a shared document for silent writing, a screen share for the round robin, and a private form for voting. Keep the same steps and timings.

If you'll be running these sessions regularly, it helps to build the moderator role as a skill. Our guide on facilitation skills covers what good facilitators do.

Where NGT fits in process improvement

In process work, NGT usually shows up at the front of a cycle. A team uses it to decide which problems to tackle, which causes to investigate, or which solutions to pilot. After that come tools that need data and analysis: a fishbone diagram to organize causes, a root cause analysis to confirm them, or a Pareto chart to size them. Think of NGT as the step that turns a room of opinions into a shortlist, so the analytical tools have something worth analyzing.