Brainstorming, When a storm is just a drizzle

Did you know that brainstorming, the technique for generating ideas in groups, developed in the late 40’s and popularized since the 50’s under a number of creative rubrics, has not proven to be effective?

Brainstorming is the process of encouraging groups to generate ideas rapidly and expansively, essentially spilling what comes to their minds without fear of criticism or negativity.  In fact, the rules of brainstorming prohibit criticism or negativity.  The group is to pursue quantity not quality. With no limits on cognitive impulses, artistic, creative, out-of-the-box thinking would flow like honey.   The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll say nothing and so the creative process is stunted.

This made tremendous intuitive sense, and seemed to be backed up by experience in the marketing world in which Alex Osborn, a partner in BBDO, an advertising firm, developed it.  Remember this was in the late forties when top down management could be quite draconian.  It was a revolution of sorts to say that every member of the team could throw out ideas without fear.  It’s just that it doesn’t really work.  Research has never supported the efficacy of brainstorming and there are some excellent arguments for why it doesn’t work.

This is important because it highlights a common phenomenon in human interactions.  In spite of the lack of supporting evidence, brainstorming, under a variety of guises remains immensely popular and there are companies that will charge thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach these rather simple practices to your organization.

To be fair, because brainstorming is fun and fairly simple to implement, it is a popular teambuilding exercise, and in fact, if teambuilding is your primary goal, you could do worse.  At least in brainstorming, no one injures themselves in their pursuit of group cohesiveness.

So why doesn’t it work?   Reasons include the self-censorship that occurs in all groups, social laziness, dominance of individual members of the group, social matching and decreased attention.  In any group session, many or most participants will fear disagreeing with the group or even with individual members of the group.  There are those who will sit back and allow the group to work without them.  In addition to being unproductive, this propensity to set the process out while everyone else is generating ideas adds the risk of being inattentive and therefore not retaining information.

In any group one or more members may also dominate the process and as those persons get a head-of-steam others will sit back for all of the reasons already mentioned.  Social matching means that when people are allowed to select their own subgroups, they will lean towards those who are like-minded, further cutting down on the necessary diversity of opinion.  In terms of self-censorship, it has been said that while the rule is that there are no bad ideas, everyone is fully aware that there are bad ideas, and that their bad ideas will be remembered.

It seems that in many ways, which go beyond the focus of this blog, the best thinking springs from individuals that have sufficient privacy and time to generate a fully-fledged idea and who then can submit these to the group for evaluation and development.  This does not suggest that we lock people away in small rooms until they come up with the idea, but does suggest that an imposed groupthink process will not be productive.  Individuals may be most creative, when not in the group.  Many of us need a period of calm and no disruptions to engage the most creative parts of our brains.  This is indeed supported by neuropsychological research/brain science.  The ideas which result may then be efficiently challenged and honed in a group process.

What’s the answer?  This is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Your organization can work to support individual creative efforts by first reexamining the atmosphere for creativity.  A favorite supervisor of mine once referred to a particular area of administration as “the place where ideas go to die.”  In such a culture, creative people will tend to leave or use their best thinking outside of the organization.

A creative culture requires that you perpetually listen to your outliers, rebels and freethinkers, not just during group brainstorming.  You may need a forum in which wild ideas can be posted, considered and then further developed in a group setting.  A team culture of honoring ideas and then subjected them to objective consideration rather than competitive or destructive urges in the team would still support the best of brainstorming but with a more efficient use of time and energy.

Well, I know this has gone on a bit.  Let’s keep thinking about it.  If you have ideas about group creativity please respond to this post.