The Problem With Brainstorming

With some degree of frustration, I have read several recent articles that headline a version of “Brainstorming doesn’t work”. These are not random critiques from amateur bloggers but critiques by scholars from world-renowned universities and experienced consultants making this proclamation. So why has Brainstorming fallen out of fashion with creativity and innovation experts and is it truly as problematic as reported?

Alex F. Osborne (the “O” in the wildly successful advertising agency BBDO during the decades following World War Two) wanted his creative team to come up with more and better ideas. The method which he called “thinking up” was designed to attack a problem like commandos storming an objective. The technique was eventually codified as brainstorming in his 1953 book Applied Imagination.

Among the problems brainstorming was designed to overcome is how criticism from a leader or colleague shuts down the generation of new ideas. Another goal was to bring out the voices of timid contributors in teams by opening a space for a “free-wheeling” generation of ideas.

Osborne’s rules for brainstorming were this:

1. Judgment or criticism of ideas must be withheld until after the ideation process.
2. Free-wheeling, or the generation of wild ideas, is encouraged. “The wilder the idea, the better; it is easier to tame down than to think up.”
3. Quantity is desirable because the more ideas that are generated, the more good ones there will be to glean later.
4. Improving on and combining with other ideas is encouraged.

Brainstorming is a technique or tool that is part of a broader set of tools and processes that rigorous research has shown to be effective in the generation of creative ideas that add value. The Osborn/Parnes* creative problem-solving process is summarized as:

1. Clarifying the problem – identifying if you are solving the right problem
2. Ideating – generating a volume of ideas, then using criteria to choose the best 
3. Developing –prototyping, testing, and refining the new ideas, and
4. Implementation – putting the developed idea into action, then examining the results.

Critical at each stage of the creative problem-solving process is the twin function of divergence and convergence. Put simply, divergence is generating a volume of ideas, whereas convergence uses criteria to select the best ideas to move forward to the next phase.

Remember these principles and processes because they are key to an accurate assessment of brainstorming’s potential and shortcomings.

Here are oft-cited criticisms of brainstorming that justify the claim that it does not work: 

• People hiding or putting forth less effort when in teams (social loafing)
• Anxiety or shyness about sharing ideas and facing public evaluation
• The tendency of people in groups to coalesce around shared ideas and not diverge from the norm
• The inability to spontaneously process a large volume of ideas, or voices getting drowned out by the crowd

The issue of free-riding or lack of engagement in a process exists in teams, but it cannot be blamed on brainstorming. Brainstorming was designed to get people more engaged in the ideation process. People have creative preferences. The work of Gerard Puccio of Buffalo State University and his colleagues demonstrates people have different preferences at different stages of the creative process. For example, Clarifiers love to ask the question “Are we solving the right problem?” but are less energized by the other phases of the clarify, ideate, develop, and implement stages of creative problem-solving. Ideators lean-in to the generation of new ideas but are less excited by refining or implementing them. And different combinations of these preferences exist in all of us. Any study measuring ideation only neglects these preferences as a fundamental part of any creative work done in teams. Of course, some of us prefer to freewheel and share ideas, while others would rather observe and modify those ideas during the development stage. 

This is where diversity in teams is indeed our strength. Our colleague Robert Alan Black says, “The question isn’t how creative are you, but how are you creative?” Matching people to their preferences in the creative process maximizes their effectiveness. For example, if you want lots of ideas in a short period ask Ideators, but heaven forbid you assign the same group to do a quick implementation. They would drive you crazy generating new ideas far past the time you were already fine-tuning and implementing your solution.

Anxiety and shyness are also real phenomena in brainstorming. People censure themselves far more effectively than any external critic can. The inner voice that says “Oh, I can’t share that idea – it is too crazy” is very effective at throttling the wild ideas Osborn encouraged. But this issue is not confined to brainstorming alone, nor a function of Osborn’s approach where wild ideas are encouraged. A few simple practices can loosen up participants and help them overcome their fears. Reframing problems by asking “What would an 8-year-old say?”, or “How would your favorite business guru approach this?” encourages new perspectives and detaches ideas from egos. One can rationalize, after all, it was the 8-year-old’s crazy idea, not mine. Other more mechanical but no less powerful techniques include brainwriting, where people write their ideas on sticky pads and pass them around to build on others’ ideas. This provides more bandwidth where hundreds of ideas are generated and shared, versus tens of ideas in the same amount of time. It also minimizes judgment and censoring of ideas by the group, who are all busy generating their ideas. 

The issue of central tendency, groupthink, or other phenomena where people coalesce around the same old ideas can be combatted by combining brainstorming with other tools like forced association, where the group is asked to take a formerly unassociated idea and combine it with the ideas they have already come up with. For example, if you brainstorm new ideas for a bathtub, you will get a certain amount of ideas, and most of those will not be too divergent. But if you ask, “What ideas come to mind for improving a bathtub when you look at bananas?” suddenly the floodgates open and your bathtub ideas bloom with ideas like a peelable surface for cleaning, the color of the tub changing with temperature like the skin on a banana changes color with age, etc. Wild ideas like a banana holder for the tub can be tamed into a built-in snack tray. (I do find it curiously amusing that when I use this example it almost always results in someone suggesting a wine dispenser). 

This brings up another issue I have with critiques of brainstorming. Many of them are based on older studies, which is not an issue in and of itself, but they tend to be based on a population of male college students that lack the diversity of most workplaces today. If you want to supercharge the generation of ideas, grab as many different people, with different demographics, different backgrounds, and different life experiences as you can. This creates a double benefit of inclusion and generative thinking.  As much as I like ideating (and it is my dominant preference) I shudder to think how dull and lifeless the creative process would be if done by a cloned army of me. 

The last issue of how to manage the volume of ideas with the bandwidth available to a group in a verbal brainstorming session is easily addressed with techniques like brainwriting. We have tools today that Alex Osborn himself probably couldn’t have dreamed of. Electronic data capture with tools like virtual flipcharts with sticky pads, real-time polling, and group editable documents, are readily available to anyone with an internet connection. The ability to record and transcribe virtual discussions with video conferencing tools is incredibly powerful for capturing every detail of an ideation session. Now combine those with artificial intelligence tools’ ability to mine and summarize data, and you have a very robust environment for capturing and classifying the ideas of any size group distributed over any distance. 

Ultimately, what makes brainstorming work is a combination of the 3 Ps of creativity: 

• Process, which includes not just ideation tools like brainstorming, but the full cycle of clarifying, ideating, developing, and implementing along with the appropriate tools and techniques used at each phase. 
• People, which is about assigning the right creative preference to the right task, and having expert facilitators who know how to deliver the maximum benefit from creative teamwork.
• Place, which is creating an environment that empowers stakeholders with a physical and psychologically safe space that allows ideas to flow freely. 

If we look at brainstorming in the context of a wider range of activities that make up the creative process and honor the classic rules for conducting a brainstorming session, the claim “ brainstorming doesn’t work” just doesn’t hold up. Throwing out brainstorming because its best use requires some care is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Paraphrasing Alex Osborn, The wilder the brainstorming process the better, it is easier to fix brainstorming than to think up a better process for generating new ideas.

*Sid Parnes and fellow scholar Ruth Noller partnered with Alex Osborn to produce a rigorous academic underpinning to the work of creative problem-solving. Their work is worth exploring and you can find it and more at https://www.creativeeducationfoundation.org/. The Osborn/Parnes process has been imitated and expanded on for nearly a century until it has become part of the DNA of many creative, improvement, and change technologies like Harvard’s Synectics, the US Military problem-solving process, IBM’s Agile, and various Design Thinking approaches. Most systematic approaches to creativity are cousins if not direct descendants of the Osborn/Parnes process. 

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