As someone who has been in the ‘creative’ industries (marketing and advertising, public relations), I have been in a lot of brainstorming sessions, both at the client side and the agency side. Whenever a large’ish problem needs solutions, a brainstorming session is usually organized by the person who earns the largest salary and the rest follow that person into a large room armed with a lot of multi-colored Post-it notes. If not Post-it notes, it’d be one person’s laptop projected on a large screen as they type what everyone is saying in the name of ideas.
This ‘brainstorm’ was invented and coined by an advertising professional, incidentally.
Alex Osborn first imagined the idea of bringing multiple together to tackle a problem creatively for solutions back in the late-30s and 1940s. However, he first coined that word in his 1953 book, Applied Imagination.
The way Alex saw brainstorms, as explained in the book, was, “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and to do so in commando fashion, with each stormer audaciously attacking the same objective.”
Elsewhere in the same book, he explains some basic rules for maximizing the output from brainstorming sessions.
Two rules stand out here – withholding criticism, and hence, aiming for quantity.
This is a standard approach if you have been in one or more brainstorming sessions. The usual idea is ‘more the better’ so that you can pick your final idea(s) from the large pool.
A lot of research has shown that this method of brainstorming ideas is actually ineffective. The most famous research is the one from 1987, titled ‘Productivity Loss In Brainstorming Groups: Toward the Solution of a Riddle‘, though it has later been contested by adding that it did not adhere to the rules strictly.
Having participated in way too many brainstorming sessions across 20+ years of my full-time employed working life, and even now, as an independent consultant, I do not believe in the efficacy of brainstorming as a concept at all.
There are a lot of factors at play in brainstorming that undermines productive output. Most of these are sound psychological factors, but they are also very easy to comprehend, based on common sense. Here are a few:
– The extroverts lead the show while the introverts usually stay guarded.
– The loudest and most vocal person could steer the group in one direction.
– The group-thinking approach aids some in the group to slack off and offer silent participation.
– When one person’s idea is welcomed with non-verbal cues (remember: withhold criticism is a rule), the others could be going in that direction to win the attention of others.
– The very act of being in a group that thinks together about a problem is seen as being busy. That is a very performative way to appear busy and given advertising industry’s obsession with timesheets, it makes sense that brainstorm was created by an ad man 🙂
– And the most important one: brainstorming allows only one person to talk at any given point, and is this simply beyond brainstorming’s problem and more of social conditioning – we observe verbal and non-verbal cues to take turns to talk in a group. But when only one person is talking, the others’ flow of thoughts is obstructed – they could forget what they were thinking, or what they want to think.
I do not subscribe to the fact that a group-thinking exercise like brainstorming needs to aim for quantity. Also, I personally believe that humans tend to think more creatively individually.
Not independently, but individually – and there is a big difference. You need stimulus and inputs to add context to your thinking and that is being dependent on other, external factors – like desk research, looking up visuals to stimulate your thoughts, reading books on specific subjects, and so on. But when you want to assimilate these together in your brain, I do not believe you need 20 more people while you load them into your brain and making your brain work.
I have been seen a better way at work.
The idea is simple – invert the brainstorming idea. Get people to understand the problem statement and let them think individually. After they have all done their thinking on their own, bring those together in a meeting to evaluate the ideas as a group! Here, the very purpose of a brainstorming session is to critique ideas as a group because we, as individuals, may have missed some perspectives, and bringing more points of view really helps in narrowing down a few meaningful ideas to pursue. After all, we humans have a point of view on everything, so why not make the best of that faculty? 🙂
Amazon’s meetings are very similar in intent, though not in approach.
Bezos famously banned Microsoft PowerPoint through a company-wide email in July 2004 and instituted a new technique for meetings in general.
The person who convenes the meeting has to prepare a 6-page memo with (largely) this outline:
1- What is being discussed?
2- How has the same been handled in the past?
3- How does the meeting convener’s idea differ?
4- Why should Amazon care about this idea?
The fundamental idea behind this 6-pager approach is this: ‘writing is thinking’ both for the presenter/convenor and for the members of the group that is meeting. For the writer, it forces going into their idea in micro-detail and at such level of detailing they are literally questioning themselves to get the most succinct version of their idea out.
For the readers, Amazon forces every meeting to start with a 30-minute silent time when all the members of the meeting sit in the same room and read the same 6-pager! No talking, no discussion – nothing! Just read silently like school children, given the document their undivided attention. This equalizes the convenor’s point of view amongst all and they are, quite literally, on the same page.
In terms of intent, this is similar to the think individually and debate as a group approach to meetings. The point in both is thinking individually, deeply, first. And then we discuss what we have formed as thoughts with each other.