Modification of the nominal group technique by using the analytic hierarchy process

Nominal Group Technique (NGT) is a useful group decision making tool. The technique has been applied to solve various kinds of group decision making problems. The use of NGT can improve quality of virtually any kind of meeting by improving the group's productivity and circumventing many of the problems inherent in group activities. The technique has the following steps: (i) Silent generation of ideas in writing, (ii) Round-robin recording of ideas, (iii) Serial discussion on the ideas, and (iv) Voting to select the most important ideas. In the 4h step, each participant needs to find out the most important 5 ideas. In the existing set-up of the methodology, there is no guidance to select the best 5 ideas, rather the participants need to do it by holistic approach. The present research proposes and validates the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a popular MCDM tool, to guide the participants to choose the best 5 ideas. To show the validity, we considered the question "What are the major challenges to the mankind in the new millennium?" in a nominal group session. The first ten ranked challenges are picked up by applying the modified NGT.