Why The New Yorker's Claim That Brainstorming "Doesn't Work" Is An Overstatement And Possibly Wrong

The current version of The New Yorker has a wonderful article by Jonah Lehrer called "Groupthink" (you can see the abstract here).  It does a great job of showing how creativity is a social process, cites wonderful research by Brian Uzzi showing that when people have experience working together in the past they produce more successful Broadway musicals (up to a point, too many old friends is as bad as too few), and offers research showing that groups where members engage in constructive conflict are more creative -- all themes I have talked about at various times on this blog. 

I do however have a major quibble.  At one point, Lehrer states flatly that brainstorming doesn't work.  He later quotes creativity researcher Keith Sawyer as saying that people are more efficient at generating ideas when they work alone than in groups, something that is well-established.  But that is not the same as saying there is conclusive evidence they don't work.

I once devoted way too much time to the question of whether this research shows that brainstorming is useless. In the name of full-disclosure, please note I am a Fellow at IDEO and also a co-founder of the Stanford d.school, which both use brainstorming a lot. But I am not at all a religious zealot about the method. I see it as just one sometimes useful method, and I have often said that the d.school in particular should spend less time teaching brainstorming and more time teaching people how to fight. (And if you want evidence that the d.school believes in more than just brainstorming, look at their Bootleg.)

But please consider several facts about the brainstorming literature, at least as it stood about 7 or 8 years ago when I last reviewed it carefully and which is consistent with a more recent paper from The Academy of Management Review (Here is the abstract, which is quite short):

1. Nearly all brainstorming research is done with people who have no training or experience in doing or leading brainstorming. In fact, there is at least two studies showing that, when facilitated properly, the so called productivity loss disappears. Check this 1996 study and this 2001 study.  To me, these two studies alone call into question the approach taken in most brainstorming studies, which don't use facilitation.   In other words, the conculsion that brainstorming doesn't work is based largely on studies that use unsupervised brainstorming virgins.

2. As Keith Sawyer's comment implies, nearly all this research looks at only one measure of effectiveness, how quickly people can produce ideas.  Because people in groups have to take time to listen to each other, it slows the idea generation process. Most brainstorming studies compare the speed at which people generate ideas such as "what can you do with a brick" when sitting alone and talking into microphone versus doing so in face-to-face groups. In fact, if creativity is about both talking and listening, if you look at the data from these same studies, I once figured out that people are exposed to substantially more ideas per unit of time when you compare group to solo brainstorming -- and I would argue that talking and listening are both key elements of the social process underlying creativity.

3.A key part of face-to-face brainstorming is building on and combining the ideas of others.  This comparison is impossible in most brainstorming studies because an individual working alone is not exposed to the ideas of others.

Indeed, one of the very first posts I did on this blog in 2006  dug on this issue.  As I wrote then, "To put it another way, if these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex." I also wrote about brainstorming here in BusinessWeek and they started with this setup.

The upshot of my research and my reading of brainstorming experiments is that, if you are just looking at the speed at which an individual can spew out ideas, individual brainstorming is likely superior. But if you look at the range of positive effects has at a place like IDEO -- spreading ideas around the company, teaching newcomers and reminding veterans of solutions and technologies and who knows what,  providing variety and intrinsically satisfying breaks for designers working on other projects, creating what I called a functional status contests where designers compete politely to show off their creativity (a key job skill), and impressing clients, brainstorming may have numerous other positive benefits in real organizations where creative work is done -- none of which have not been examined in those simple experiments.  If so, those findings about pure efficiency may well be beside the point when it comes to evaluating brainstorming in organizations that use it routinely.

In short, I believe that Lehrer's statement that brainstorming "doesn't work" is too sweeping because it has not been studied adequately in real organizations or with people who have real brainstorming skills. Again, I would describe this as a quibble; the article in The New Yorker is otherwise excellent.

P.S. for the true nerds, here is the 1996 academic article on brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I wrote:

Download ASQ Storming

Comments

[Karen Burgess]

I read the article carefully and thought it was very interesting. I particularly wondered about the headline - nowhere in the article, that I could note, did the authors discuss Groupthink. Groupthink is bad, but it's not linked to brainstorming, in fact it's the result of a premature rush to agreement that is the antithesis to getting as many ideas out on the table! I also note that brainstorming seems to be reserved for the design or problem-solving process. I've been in groups that use brainstorming very effectively for creative communications. Coming up with taglines, campaign themes, etc., works very well when the goal is to generate 100 related thoughts so that you can come up with five themes that have resonance.

[SmartStorming]

Bob, thanks for an excellent post! I've found myself making the very same points to a variety of people over the past week.

As you say, what the studies cited prove that brainstorming doesn't work - when it's done badly. You mention that those studied had no training. In fact, in our work at SmartStorming, with well over 1,000 people from a range of backgrounds, we have learned that more than 90% of the people leading group ideation sessions have had NO training whatsoever in how to do it effectively.

They are generally unaware of any of the necessary planning requirements, process, leadership skills - and utilize no ideation techniques of any kind.

(By the way, I should point out that I am using the term "brainstorming" here as it is commonly used today - to describe any group idea generation session, not just one that uses Osborn's specific technique and guidance.)

Of course, there have been other studies that show, when best practices are applied, brainstorms are quite effective. (And certainly our own experience, yours and IDEO's, and that of our clients, supports this.) The most recent I'm aware of was done at North Carolina State University in 2010. See...

http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/248-business-brainstorming-is-as-much-an-art-as-a-science.html

So in the spirit of not throwing out the baby with the bath water, I encourage those truly interested in being more effective at generating and developing more and better ideas - learn how to do it the right way!

(I just want to add that we have great respect for the work done by Tom Kelley and IDEO!)

Keith Harmeyer
Partner
SmartStorming
http://SmartStorming.com

[Geoff Morton-Haworth (@geoffreymh)]

"The Rise of the New Groupthink" cites Steve Wozniak of Apple to demonstrate the importance of solo work. But for every catchy example taken out of context to make a point there are usually a dozen others with the opposite interpretation.

For example, again in the computing field, the extraordinary success of open source software development is attributed to a kind of brainstorming. This is the proposition that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" so that the more widely available the source code is for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, the more rapidly all forms of bugs will be discovered. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

"Semantic differential" is an important notion in the study of human intelligence. You can measure the depth of your understanding – and to say it bluntly, your intelligence – by the number of points of view you apply when you consider something or someone.

And the same can apply to the collective intelligence of a group. The key to creative dialogue is to strive for mutual understanding (walking around in each other's shoes for a while) and not to push for consensus.

[Bob Sutton]

Thanks Bard

[Brad Evans]

"Brian" Uzzi.

[MeredithConder]

Group brainstorming happens b/c time has been set aside for it. Co's or employees need to set aside time for individual ideation.