Bruce Nussbaum and Jessie Scanlon from BusinessWeek invited me to write something on what it takes to do effective brainstorming after they saw my post on Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal. I went back and re-read the academic research on brainstorming and remain amazed by how detached it is from what it actually happens when people and teams do creative work. I developed this argument and management guidelines in an article that just appeared in BusinessWeek's Innovation and Design section. Check out Eight Tips for Better Brainstorming.
I would also like to add a point that isn't covered in this article. Not all psychology experiments are irrelevant to what happens in organizations. I am a strong proponent of using experimental methods when they reflect either the fundamentals of human behavior or have some hope of reflecting what actually happens in the real world. For a superb example of how this can be done, check out Max Bazerman's book Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. Unfortunately, the assumptions and methods that most brainstorming researchers use in their experiments produce rigorous evidence that is, unfortunately, of little relevance. This isn’t just my opinion. I made a presentation a few years ago about brainstorming to a room full of renowned experimentalists at the Stanford Psychology Department, which included Mark Lepper, Lee Ross, and Robert Zajonc. The group was even more vehement about how unrealistic brainstorming research was as a model for how group work and creative work actually is done in real places.
Interesting on brainstorming and, after backtracking all your references, fairly accurate. As it happens - as the result of an earlier comment - Mr. Sandberg interviewed me for the brainstorming column and my observations were quite close to yours. To wit - brainstorming often doesn't work but can be very powerful if properly managed. The participants have to bring skill, trust and NO politics to the table and the session needs to be structured by good facilitation. The overall process can be run by rules but is more art than science.
A critical component is looking at the boundaries between skills and disciplines because often the most innovative suggestions come from there. As well it often helps to lay out a template and coach folks thru to give them something to react to on a clean slate.
We ran a 3-day exercise on the role of customer service in corporate performance built around our models AND leverging a group decision support tool called Team Focus. In three days our participaants/clients made more progress in thinking thru enterprise service focused strategies AND provided us with powerful insights and marketing feedback that neither side could have duplicated with 12 months of normal effort. It was magnificent but never repeated.
Posted by: DBLWYO | July 29, 2006 at 08:42 AM