To B… or not to B…What we know about Brainstorming
A Little History
Not everyone knows how the practice of brainstorming got its start. In the 1930s an advertising executive named Alex Osborn began working out ways to develop creative ideas for new ad campaigns. One of the approaches he developed was to invite a group of people into a room to think together. He discovered this led to a sharp increase in both the quantity and quality of ideas. Although Osborn called these sessions “organized ideation,” the group began calling them “brainstorming sessions.” And while most of us today assume that the phrase has something to do with creating a whole storm of ideas, it actually is derived from the military’s use of the word “storm,” as in “storming the gates.” In other words they were using their brains, “…to storm a problem.”[1]
As he developed the idea, and started writing about it in the 1940s, he developed a set of principles or rules for how to do it successfully. Some of them are well-known today. Others, unfortunately, have been largely overlooked.
His well-known rules are:
Go for quantity.
Withhold criticism. Don’t judge the ideas until the session is over.
Welcome wild ideas. A crazy idea might lead to an important insight or challenge an inappropriate assumption.
Combine and improve ideas.
Some of the less-remembered and under-observed principles are:
Provide the brainstorming group with a clear problem statement in advance of the session.
Make sure the problem is simple and narrow. He believed brainstorming was ill-suited to complex problems.
Use a group of approximately twelve people—a mix of experts and non-experts.
One of the best-known and most-cited sources for “modern” brainstorming practice is IDEO, the well-known design company based in Palo Alto, CA. They observe seven rules in their brainstorming sessions, four of which are direct descendants of Osborn’s original list:
Defer judgment
Encourage wild ideas
Build on the ideas of others
Stay focused on the topic
One conversation at a time
Be visual
Go for quantity
Challenges
Over the years, a lot of research has gone into testing Osborn’s original practices. How well it holds up depends on whom you ask.
For instance, Loran Nordgren of the Kellog School of Management is one of many who argue that brainstorming sessions are often made less successful because of the psychological phenomenon of “anchoring.” Simply, ideas expressed early in the session become the anchors around which later ideas rotate. Thus, the ideal of challenging assumptions and breaking old paradigms is undermined by this anchoring effect.
Another challenge to brainstorming, substantiated by research, is the fact that if you take all those people who would have been in a brainstorming session, and just have them write down their ideas individually and privately, they come up with far more, and more diverse, ideas in total.
A third significant challenge to brainstorming emerged from research done by Charlan Nemeth at UC Berkeley. She wanted to test the validity of another of Osborn’s core ideas—whether deferring judgement really was a good idea. In the end, she found that groups that debated the merit of ideas during the ideation session—not deferring that debate—came up with 20% more ideas than groups that stuck to Osborn’s principle. In fact, when participants in the research were asked after the session whether they had any additional ideas, those who had been in the debating groups had an average of seven more ideas. Those from the non-debating groups had only three.
Finally, there’s the general issue of modern problems being too complicated for effective brainstorming. Ben Jones, also of Kellogg, argues that the problems we have left to solve aren’t the kind that allow us to follow Osborn’s principle of simplicity and clarity: “A hundred years ago, the Wright brothers could build an airplane all by themselves. Now Boeing needs hundreds of engineers just to design and produce the engines.”[2]
Those are some pretty serious criticisms. You might very well be asking yourself whether brainstorming should be done at all. Here are two sets of thoughts.
More than just Ideating
First of all, the time spent together has benefits that go beyond just coming up with ideas. Camaraderie, team-building, and even learning to debate productively are all significant benefits that you lose when you employ other methods of idea-generation. It is true that these benefits can be achieved in other ways, but if you expand your metrics for successful brainstorming to include these less-tangible outcomes, you can argue that brainstorming is still valuable.
Fixing your Brainstorming
Second, if we think about the criticisms leveled against brainstorming, there are some tweaks and alternatives that can help.
Choose Your Battles
Going back to Osborn’s principles, make sure that the problem you have chosen is well-suited to a brainstorming session. Despite Jones’ perspective that modern scientific problems are immensely complex, there are still plenty of problems emerging in organizations around the globe that are novel and even complicated, without being complex. Problems that are too complex for brainstorming should be solved in other ways. It is interesting to note, though, that while Jones would argue that brainstorming doesn’t help design jet engines, collaboration is mandatory.
If you’d like an example of the difference between complex and complicated, think of the great scene in the movie Apollo 13 where an engineer dumps a pile of materials on a table top and tells the team they need to figure out how to make a round filter fit a square hole, using the stuff on the table. It’s a complicated problem, in the sense that there are a lot of materials, and potentially many ways to solve the problem, but there’s no complexity: fit this into this using these. Turns out, it’s a great problem for brainstorming.
Preparation
Although Osborn believed—and wrote—that preparation was key to successful brainstorming, most of us modern practitioners know that this is often, perhaps typically, overlooked. Giving the team members a chance to think about the problem and start their brainstorming before the official session is a great way to compensate for, and potentially counteract the anchoring dilemma. If each person walks into the room with some ideas already in place (especially if they are written down), the likelihood that they will be drawn down another person’s line of thought merely because the other person spoke first will be minimized.
Team Design
Another thing most of us know is that brainstorming tends to happen within existing teams, rather than teams purpose-built for the session and the problem at hand. That means that we are probably, though inadvertently, playing into the anchoring dilemma. After all, over time teams fall into patterns, including patterns of deference—who gets to go first, whose ideas get more consideration; and patterns of contribution—who will do the work of carrying the meeting and generating ideas, and who gets away with not really having to prepare because they know other members of the team will take care of it for them. Brainstorming in existing teams also means that we are probably violating another of Osborn’s core principles: mixing expertise and lack of expertise. So, more time spent making sure the right people are in the room will likely improve your results.
Practice Debate
In our view, one of the reasons the “defer judgment” rule has been practiced so studiously is that it makes the conversation easy. It’s considerably easier to say “no judgement” than to actively manage the way ideas get debated, and to build a culture of productive challenge and debate. Frankly, a lot of leaders are ill-equipped to manage those conversations, especially if they are also trying to contribute to the content of the brainstorming.
Hiring a professional facilitator can be a great help—someone who can introduce, teach and enforce ground rules that lead to productive conflict and debate, and who isn’t worried about contributing to the list or even about whether they are liked when the session is over. With time, the facilitation skills can be transferred to the team members, but where this is no existing culture of constructive debate, it will be very tempting to just avoid debate altogether.
A lesson from the field: on balance, consulting firms have gotten really good at vigorously debating ideas without damaging the relationships or confidence of their employees (I can imagine the comments being made out there about consultants’ egos being impervious to damage…). The ability to separate the idea from the person who voiced the idea is an immensely beneficial one, and an aspect of your team’s culture you should actively work on strengthening, especially if you want to get better at innovation and creativity.
Conclusion
Here’s the upshot—Osborn took a huge step forward when he invented and codified brainstorming. But his wasn’t the final word. If you’re basically following the “standard” rules of brainstorming, you can do better. The easiest way is to actually follow all of his rules, and not just the convenient ones.
We’ll do a follow-up post on alternative methods for generating ideas. In the meantime, let us know what you think of this, and share suggestions for getting the most out of your brainstorming sessions.
[1] Trott, Paul; Hartmann, Dap; van der Duin, Patrick; Scholten, Victor; Ortt, Roland (2016). Managing Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Oxon: Routledge. p. 63. ISBN 9780415677219.
[2] Groupthink: The brainstorming myth, New Yorker Magazine, By Jonah Lehrer, January 23, 2012