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Your Team Is Brainstorming All Wrong by Art Markman

May 18, 2017

Summary.   When your team is given the task to generate ideas to solve a problem,

it’s a natural reaction to su�est a brainstorming session. But research shows that

groups that use traditional brainstorming approaches come up with fewer ideas

(and fewer good ideas) than the...

When your team is tasked with generating ideas to solve a problem,

suggesting a brainstorming session is a natural reaction. But does that

approach actually work?

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Brainswarming: Because Brainstorming Doesn't Work

Dr. Tony McCaffrey outlines a

new way to generate ideas.

Although the term “brainstorming” is now used as a generic term for

having groups develop ideas, it began as the name of a specific

technique proposed by advertising executive Alex Osborn in the

1950s. He codified the basic rules that many of us follow when

getting people together to generate ideas: Toss out as many ideas as

possible. Don’t worry if they’re too crazy. Build on the ideas people

generate. Don’t criticize initially.

These rules seem so obvious and clear that it’s hard to believe they

don’t work. However, decades of studies demonstrate that groups

that use Osborn’s rules of brainstorming come up with fewer ideas

(and fewer good ideas) than the individuals would have developed

alone.

There are several reasons for this

productivity loss, as academics call

it. For one, when people work

together, their ideas tend to

converge. As soon as one person

throws out an idea, it affects the

memory of everyone in the group

and makes them think a bit more

similarly about the problem than

they did before. In contrast, when

people work alone, they tend to

diverge in their thinking, because

everyone takes a slightly different

path to thinking about the

problem.

You can harness the power of

divergence and convergence to fix brainstorming, and several studies

demonstrate that this works effectively. Here are some of the lessons

from this research.

Let Individuals Work Alone First

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YOU AND YOUR TEAM SERIES

Thinking Creatively

How Senior Executives Find Time to Be Creative

by Emma Seppala

Can 10 Minutes of Meditation Make You More Creative?

by Emma Schootstra, Dirk Deichmann,

and Evgenia Dolgova

How to Spark Creativity When You’re in a Rut

by Priscilla Claman

Early in creative acts it’s important to diverge, that is, to think about

what you are doing in as many ways as possible. Later, you want to

converge on a small number of paths to follow in more detail.

Many techniques use a structure

like this. For example, in the 6-3-5

method, six people sit around a

table and write down three ideas.

They pass their stack of ideas to

the person on their right, who

builds on them. This passing is

done five times, until everyone has

had the chance to build on each of

the ideas. Afterward, the group

can get together to evaluate the

ideas generated.

There are many variations of

techniques like this. What they

have in common is that they allow

individual work during divergent

phases of creativity and group

work during convergent phases.

Techniques like this can be used in multiple rounds. For example, it is

often important to spend time agreeing on the problem to be solved.

A whole round of divergence and convergence on the problem

statement can be done before giving people a chance to suggest

solutions. 

Take Your Time

Another difficulty with brainstorming is that there are often some

people in the group who don’t like uncertainty. They want to finish

the process quickly and get on with implementing the new solution.

These people are high in a personality characteristic called need for

closure.

It’s important that groups have time to explore enough ideas that they

can consider more than just the first few possibilities that people

generate. One reason why techniques like 6-3-5 are successful is that

they slow the creative process down. They alert everyone in the group

up front that evaluation isn’t going to happen until everyone has

generated ideas and has had a chance to build on them. As a result,

even people high in need for closure are forced to wait until the ideas

are developed.

Let People Draw

Many brainstorming sessions involve people talking about solutions.

That biases people toward solutions that are easy to talk about. It may

also lead to solutions that are abstract and may never work in

practice.

As a result, many techniques (such as C-Sketching) require people to

draw pictures rather than writing. Our studies suggest that a

combination of drawing and writing is ideal for generating creative

solutions to problems.

There are several reasons why drawing is helpful.

First, it’s hard for people to describe spatial relationships, so any

solution that requires a spatial layout is better described with pictures

than with words. Second, a large amount of the brain is devoted to

visual processing, so sketching and interpreting drawings increases

the involvement of those brain regions in idea generation. Third, it is

often difficult to describe processes purely in words, so diagrams are

helpful.

One caution about drawing: People tend to sketch quickly, in ways

that make their sketches hard to interpret, so it’s useful to have words

in the diagrams to help with the interpretation of these sketches. But

haste may not be all bad. The same studies I referenced above also

demonstrate that when other people look at crudely drawn sketches,

they may misinterpret elements of the drawings in ways that

serendipitously lead to new ideas.

One of the joys of the brainstorming session is you, as the group

leader, don’t need to spend that much time facilitating or preparing.

You just get people in a room and go. But while this makes things

easier for you, it’s not good for the group. To develop stronger ideas,

you need to manage the conversation so that the team doesn’t

converge on a solution before everyone hears what others are

thinking. Until you develop some expertise in helping groups to

develop ideas, use a technique like 6-3-5. It’s often easier to follow a

process and watch how it unfolds than to try to manage a group

dynamically and sense when the group is ready to start working

together.

Art Markman, PhD, is the Annabel Irion

Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and

Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin and

founding director of the program in the Human

Dimensions of Organizations. He has written over

150 scholarly papers on topics including

reasoning, decision making, and motivation. His

new book is Bring Your Brain to Work: Using

Cognitive Science to Get a Job, Do it Well, and

Advance Your Career (HBR Press).

AM