The Balkan Yankee

In my last post I expressed my distaste for brainstorming which put some people on the defensive, particularly those like Patricia who make a living selling the concept of “collective intelligence”, but unfortunately I didn’t take the opportunity to form a supportive argument. So, it was this quote from Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect which started the discussion, and I think it’s an interesting one. I wont get the chance to read the book until I can pick it up in The States or the UK, so I’m not sure how to respond to Patricia’s claim that he is actually in support of brainstorming. That would mean Marc Andreessen took a quote completely out of context distorting his ideas to support his opinion, which I’m pretty skeptical about. Either way, I’m willing to keep an open mind about it, but here are some of my problems with brainstorming:

First of all, I’ll agree that brainstorming isn’t usless. It’s just useless most of the time, which I’ll also agree has mostly to do with the fact that brainstorming sessions are often poorly administered. That still doesn’t mean that a well administered brainstorming session will out perform focused individuals tackling individual problems. It just means they wont be beaten as miserably. I think the one thing we can rely on well administered brainstorming creating is the “feeling” of having accomplished something when what is really created a great team building experience. You have given them an incentive to reinforce and feel good about the decisions the group makes. The power of people’s own influence over one another create a situation where the group can unconsciously sacrifices quality of ideas for a high group morale.

I’m not attacking collaboration, or teamwork and I definitely don’t believe that innovation happens in a bubble, because that is clearly not true. Modern human achievement owes much to our ability to exchange information and ideas quickly and easily. Jared Diamond explains the development of advanced Eurasian civilization in contrast to early American, and Australian aboriginal civilizations in no small part by their ability to travel, exchange, and communicate ideas easily across a geographic latitude.

Today, the internet and the flattening world that Thomas Friedman describes are making this exchange and communication possible at a level unresricted by gepgraphy. This is hugely exciting to me and I think we’re clearly benefiting from the innovation created by this increased ability to work together.

So what’s the bottom line? I’m not gonna say nobody should be using brainstorming. Maybe some people are really more creative working in a group. I definitely don’t think it is a reliable method for everyone. I think Patricia has plenty of work to do in getting teams to work better together, because there always the need for us to communicate and work better with each other in the work place. I just don’t think we need to be telling ourselves that brainstorming is going to be improving our ideas from their conception. That is the illusion.

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