Brainstorming sucks, and I’m not antisocial for thinking so
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 2:50 pmMarc Andreessen is one of my favorite new bloggers consistently serving up food for thought. He usually blogs about business in the tech industry, but this post which is simply a quote from Frans Johansson’s book The Medici Effect (Note: add to reading list) was particularly interesting to me today. Excerpt from excerpt:
“In 1958… psychologists let groups of four people brainstorm about the practical benefits or difficulties that would arise if everyone had an extra thumb on each hand after next year. These people were called “real groups” since they actually brainstormed together. Next, the researchers let “virtual groups” of four people generate ideas around the “thumb problem”, but they had to brainstorm individually, in separate rooms. The researchers combined the answers they received from each [virtual group] individual and eliminated redundancies… They then compared the performance between real groups and virtual groups…
To their surprise, the researchers found that virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups.”
I have always felt like this was true. I have dreaded brainstorming sessions since working on elementary school projects. We never accomplished much in those grade school sessions, and the same goes for the adult workplace. I will never go into a brainstorming session without preparing my own thoughts ahead of time, thus using the “brainstorming” as a way to simply validate or de-validate the ideas I came up with beforehand. I think I feared that in someway this meant I was anti-social, or less of a team player… apparently not. 
July 31st, 2007 at 7:04 pm
I tend to agree most of the time- there is always someone in a group that foists mediocure ideas onto the rest so aggressively that the rest of the group finally backs down and agrees, or the really brilliant person who won’t speak up until afterwards and then says, “Well, I thought we could do that too, but….” Teams are great for executing pre-existing ideas, but not always for the brainstorming. I think, more often than not, it is the dynamic of a group when it is brainstorming that controls its success, as opposed to the actual process of brainstorming. Individually, people have to be be strong in order to be heard, and considerate enough to be quiet for the introverts to say what they need to to be validated…
Well, as my grandfather said, “If a bullfrog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass when it hopped.”
July 31st, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Through experience, I have always been aware that group brainstorming sessions do nothing but cripple the process for any number of reasons. Your true inner creativity is stiffled by a bogged down exercise in futility. It is true that the right people at the right time at the right place could sometimes actually enhance the project, but we don’t live in a perfect world.
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:06 pm
[…] sessions were just poorly conceived and poorly run. Unfortunately, this is the experience some people have with brainstorming. This makes me […]
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Frans Johansson is in favor of brainstorming - he says it leads to innovation. The reason brainstorming frequently doesn’t work is that people haven’t got the group process skills to manage it successfully.
Dr. Paul Nutt in “Why Decisions Fail” found that decisions reached without generating sufficient ideas from involved stakeholders invariably failed.
August 6th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Thanks for the trackback to my comment!
For an in-depth response to the “Brainstorming is a Bad Idea” quote, read on: http://www.interactionassociates.com/ideas/2007/08/in_defense_of_brainstorming.php