Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal

Today's Wall Street Journal has a column that questions the value of group brainstorming for generating new ideas. Andy Hargadon and I spent several years studying this topic, which included an 18 month ethnography of the role of brainstorming at IDEO. The upshot is that it is an idiotic debate and that much of the "research" that is cited by Paul Paulus is rigorous but irrelevant.  A few key points about most brainstorming research by academics:

1. Brainstorming performance is defined only as the efficiency of idea generation -- the number of ideas generated per person in say a 15 minute session. It does not measure idea quality, commitment to the ideas, whether people learned things from listening to others ideas, subsequent success and so on. It also doesn't measure whether different people's ideas are built on or recombined because that is impossible in an individual brainstorm. The main finding is true -- but completely trivial -- individuals can speak more ideas into a microphone when they are working alone because they don't have to wait their turn to talk (and do that awful thing of listening to others ideas!).

2. The people in these experiments -- nearly all undergraduates -- have no past experience doing or leading brainstorms (In fact, in the one experiment that I know of where people were led by trained facilitators, the so-called disadvantages of group brainstorming went away).

3. Not one one of these experimental studies on "brainstorming performance" has ever been done in an organization where it is work practice that is used as a routine part of the work.  Paulus wrote me some years back that he tried to recruit some "real" organizations that did real creative work, but had no luck. 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.

More generally, the question of whether "individual" or "group" brainstorming is "better" for creative work is, for starters, sort of like asking "what is more important, my brain or my heart?"  You need group brainstorming just to get the diverse ideas out on the table, to create a setting where people can build one each others ideas, and so that people can express public commitment to developing them. And you need time alone to reflect and think about what ideas you will bring to a brainstormer and what to do with the ideas after the brainstormer. In fact, in his classic, Applied Imagination, Alex Osborne was very careful to say that creativity depended on alternating between group and individual ideation.  And in fact, Paulus own research is starting to show this as well.

Also, the fact is that people in creative workplaces already know this, they always do both, and usually spend more time generating ideas alone than in groups -- our surveys at IDEO showed that, as skilled as they are at brainstorming, few designers spent more than 5 to 10 percent of their work week in brainstorming sessions. It is just one part of the "mix" of creative work, so examining brainstorming without looking at it in  the larger context where it is done -- in an an organization, by experts, and woven together with other work practices -- is useless.

The WSJ article also quotes people in "real jobs" who talk about the notion that they've never had an idea in a meeting and that meetings stifle their creativity. No doubt that happens to some people, but it is less likely to happen when people are experienced at brainstorming, led by an experienced facilitator, and don't work in a place where people work in fear. One of the critics of group brainstorming had worked at GE -- an organization that fired (or "moved-out") the bottom 10% of its employees for years -- I'd feel uncomfortable saying something that sounds dumb in that setting too because, after all, it might cost me my job.

Comments

[Keith Harmeyer]

Excellent post and absolutely true. The key factor that makes brainstorming less effective than it might be is poor facilitation, which is almost universal. In our research we find that fewer than 90% of people surveyed have ever had any training in group brainstorming. It is completely naive to assume that an activity as complex as group ideation will just "happen" without a skilled leader guiding the process. It precisely this kind of training that we offer at SmartStorming. Thanks again for a great post!

[sveta]

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[Helga]

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[Idris Mootee]

This is pretty silly issue to debate about in the first place. It all depends on the quality of individual participants, the mix and the atmosphere. Brainstorming in a corporate board room will surely deminish the return of creativity. One other thing is you need a balance of domain knwoledge and outsiders objectivity. It is all common sense.

[Shawn]

Hi Bob, can you point me to your ethnographic research on brainstorming please. Sounds facinating.

[Amit Dixit]

Brainstorming, is good - give us lot of different direction to think, challenges your own thoughts etc....Group Brainstorming is even better - only if, every one in the group looking for the solution rather than showing their intellect.!............Because most of the topics on which ppl do brainstorming are quite subjective...people will continue doing brainstorming on them as their is no perfect right or wrong answer for them........But brainstorming on the Topic brainstorming really sucks!

[Dr. Rod King]

I've been doing extensive research on techniques and methodologies for generating ideas and I very much support the position taken above by Robert Sutton. Brainstorming should be done individually such as in the "brainwriting" technique and in groups such as in classic brainstorming. I feel that the question of individual vs. group brainstorming boils down to the issue of individual vs. collective knowledge base for generating ideas. In theory, greater and higher quality ideas are more likely to be generated when using a group's knowledge base than when using an individual's knowledge base. In practice, however, some individuals better extract their ideas alone than when externally prompted such as by a facilitator with little domain-specific experience.
My final word: if a brainstorming facilitator is as skillful as an individual is in extracting ideas from the pit of that individual's knowledge base, then group brainstorming will at least be useful to that individual. Otherwise, group brainstorming will be seen as an impediment rather than an enhancer in generating greater and higher quality ideas. To better reflect on this issue, we might consider the question: How can we best extract ideas that lie deep in the knowledge bases of individuals? After all, insights and ideas are generated in 'individual' heads, not in 'group' heads.

Best regards,
Rod.

[david]

i do belive in the mix, though brainstorming is difficult to do well! at least,i havn't got it down yet! the ideo tip bit's in ten faces and art of innovation, are enticing but still difficult to apply in a busy workplace. how do you keep it short and effective? anybody got some good reading tips!?