Brainstorming, Good and Bad
It's official: There's a New York-based conspiracy to keep organization staff from working together to generate ideas.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned an essay in the New York Times by Susan Cain casting doubt on fashionable bullpen-style collaborative office spaces. A few weeks later, the New Yorker has weighed in with an article that also seems to encourage everybody to scamper back to their desks and delete their Outlook meeting notices. In "Groupthink," Jonah Lehrer throws cold water on the notion that brainstorming sessions are useful ways to generate great ideas. He quotes one psychologist's summary of where the research currently stands: "[B]rainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas."
Lehrer's article has absorbed plenty of brickbats online, but I don't think he's said anything especially outrageous, really. His point is that while brainstorming sessions in themselves are moderately useful, idea generation works best when healthy criticism of idea is also part of the mix. Alex Osborn, the advertising executive who promoted brainstorming in the 40s, saw it as a two-part process---criticism-free ideation, followed by some process of critique or culling. But in Lehrer's reckoning, organizations tend to forget about the second part, lapsing into everybody-gets-a-trophy mode. Leaders now congratulate themselves for having the process in the first place, even if that means a smart idea for building revenue is now on equal footing with an idea to buy posters with adorable kittens and the words "Let's do a purr-fect job!" and staple-gun them to every employee's cube.
"Organizations are great at killing ideas," wrote blogger Kent Anderson, laying out his own concerns with the piece. "The first step is to create an enforced safe zone in which ideas can flourish. Implicit in the process is that later these ideas will be critiqued and winnowed down." Implicit, Lehrer might say---but not actually practiced. "It is the human friction that makes the sparks," is the line with which he concludes his article. What's missing from this back-and-forth, though, is a discussion of how that criticism---that friction---is best delivered.
So, then: Do you see criticism diminishing or even absent from your brainstorming sessions? If not, what are the ways you deliver criticism that promote the best ideas but still keep those ideas flowing?
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Comments
Brainstorming is a very difficult process. I have never seen it done without some level of criticism, even when it was made abundantly clear that criticism had no place within the process.
But this may be the reason. Too often, brainstorming sessions are given too few limitations. For example, perhaps you want a team of people to brainstorm ways to improve your annual conference. If you know that costs are a limitation, or that certain things must always be part of the conference, those limitations must be given to the group. All too often, someone brainstorms an idea, only to hear - well, we can't afford that. Or..we can't stop that, our board has indicated that we must do that event.
Like any project, the more input and guidance you can give at the beginning, the better the process will be.
Posted by: Anthony Demangone | February 17, 2012 8:46 AM
Edward deBono and others have noted three primary stages in the idea development process: (1) Creative thinking in which the goal is to generate the maximum number of interesting possibilities; (2) critical thinking in which the goal is to evaluates those possibilities using agreed upon criteria; and (3) critical thinking in which take the best possibilities that meet your criteria and develop the action plan for their execution.
By its very nature, brainstorming is generally used as a creative thinking technique, so in that instance, no, there shouldn't be critical thinking occurring. It's the next stage. But, the heart of brainstorming is really pausing the real-time evaluation of any ideas shared, so you can conceivably use it in the critical thinking stage to think of all the reasons something won't work (what deBono calls "black hat" thinking in his Six Thinking Hats model.
So often what people are calling an unconference, Open Space, brainstorming, or many other models, formats, or techniques is anything but. Too often someone takes one aspect of a more rigorous approach or methodology and carry that forward as if it is the complete deal. So what some of these articles are criticizing is the abused or misrepresented version of something that actually can be quite valuable when done thoroughly and appropriately.
Stepping down from soapbox now.
Posted by: Jeffrey Cufaude | February 17, 2012 5:40 PM
Thanks for your comments. Anthony, I think you bring up a good point that participants don't always get very good guidance about what the scope of the brainstorming session needs to be; it may be that managers are trained to not put limits on a discussion, but a clear understanding of what needs to be brainstormed about can likely help better answers rise to the top. Edward De Bono is a new name for me, Jeffrey, but I'm looking forward to investigating further.
Posted by: Mark Athitakis | February 23, 2012 3:38 PM
Brainstorming can serve many purposes, and you need to know what the purpose is first. You also need to take into account your audience. It really depends on the purpose of brainstorming whether or not you need to attach judgment and assignment to it. For example, if you are having a brainstorming session just to collect ideas from donors or from people who support your cause, that is great. Sometimes people just want to be heard. You don’t have to assign judgment to that brainstorming, and they can still feel like it was valuable. It can work the same way with team building. If you are using brainstorming for a group exercise that is supposed to be fun, you do not have to assign judgment to it. Now, if your purpose is to find a new revenue source for non-dues revenue generation, absolutely you need to assign and rate judgment and value and analysis. In this case, the brainstorming is going to an audience – a senior team. It really goes back to knowing what the purpose is and who the audience is. The feel-good element is as important as any purpose; it doesn’t all have to be linear. There's a book that’s very popular, written in ’96, called “Orbiting the Giant Hairball” (http://www.amazon.com/Orbiting-Giant-Hairball-Corporate-Surviving/dp/0670879835) which a lot of people quote and the whole book is about how to be creative and get around, literally, orbiting a giant hairball. One of the things he says is if you are going to brainstorm, you cannot be attached to the outcome.
Posted by: Annie Gallagher | March 5, 2012 1:27 PM