Brainstorming is B.S. Here’s why..
A review of Brainstorming Is Dumb by Annie Sneed
Everyone at some part of their professional life must’ve heard the word ‘brainstorming’. People use it as a magical term which is expected to produce groundbreaking ideas and provide solution to almost every problem that they’re facing. If the company’s experiencing losses, brainstorm! If you’re not making enough sales, brainstorm! If your business is stagnated, brainstorm! Something like:
In almost every company, especially in startups when they’re in a fix, a meeting of all the employees is called and they’re told to ‘brainstorm’ ideas. And this is not some recent trend, BS has been around for more than half a century and yet people keep using it, expecting a miracle every time.
Well, I’m not saying that asking employees to come up with ideas is not a good idea. What I’m saying is that there are much better alternatives to BS. In the article “Brainstorming is dumb”, the author talks about a new technique called brainwriting, which is basically BS done with pen and paper. The article just doesn’t suggest alternative methods, but also goes ahead finding out the results when tried out in combination with BS.
The article begins with explaining everything that’s wrong with BS and why it doesn’t work. It mentions that many scientific studies have been conducted to test the effectiveness of brainstorming and the conclusion of these studies have been a ‘resounding no’. And apart from specifying a concrete answer, the article also explains the reason behind it, even saying that ideating alone is better than group BS.
The article mentions a number of reasons for the lack of effectiveness of BS, like it being a complex method requiring the participant to do various activities like listen, think, add, collaborate and build simultaneously. And I completely agree with the author on this point, since, thinking of new ideas while being constantly bombarded with ideas from others in the group can be quite overwhelming. And as the article says, the session ends up being dominated by the ideas of one or two individuals, while the others either forget their ideas or abandon them thinking them to be inferior to the ones discussed.
And being an introvert, I’ve faced this a lot. Having a constant anxiety of people finding my ideas stupid, I’m always hesitant to place them on the discussion table. And adding to that if there are popular ideas keep popping up, my ideas are instantly lead to their graves. And this can result in the company losing out on quite a number of good opportunities, as even though sometimes people may not consider their ideas worth discussing, if discussed with others, the other could’ve built on those ideas and something really groundbreaking could’ve come out of it.
Thus to avoid these complexities, the author suggests that we should instead try brainwriting, which includes each person writing his or her idea on a piece of paper and then that paper being circulated throughout the room thus making everyone aware of everyone’s ideas.
And I really like this approach, having actually tried something similar first hand. During one of my research classes, the professor had made us do something similar. He told us to write, our ideas on a piece of paper and pass it around the group and yielded great results. Some of my classmates who had never opened their mouth in ideation sessions before, were more comfortable writing down their ideas. And as for the people who used to dominate these sessions, they found out new perspectives, which helped them produce more number of as well as better ideas, thus resulting in an overall improvement in the quantity and quality of ideas generated by the group.
The article then mentions a study conducted by Paul Paulus and his team, in an actual workplace, where 57 employees were made to brainwrite instead of BS. As expected adopting this technique resulted in improvements, but Paul wanted to go further and find out exact combination of brainwriting in a group and in isolation, the one which will result in the generation of maximum number of ideas.
So, after trying out a variety of permutations and combinations, the study concluded that the alternating method, which included switching between group interaction and working alone, produces the most ideas (0.50 ideas a minute). And according to Paulus this conclusion makes perfect sense as he has stated:
Alone, you never get other people’s ideas. And if you’re in a group all the time, you may spend more time thinking about other people’s ideas than your own
Though these findings are backed by statistics, the article debates whether the small sample size of the research might have any effects on the accuracy of the findings. But according to Paulus, although the sample size was small, the study was conducted in an actual workplace and lead to the generation of real ideas, something which makes the findings quite practical and thus relevant in the real world scenarios.
And I agree with him and so does Leigh Thompson, a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University, further explaining that these studies have given us more confidence than what has been found in the lab and can be meaningfully applied in the real business world.
And thus the article ends on a perfect note with the following statement made by Paulus,
Just because you throw people together doesn’t mean wonderful things happen. It has to happen in the right way.
Something which has been backed by a good enough research, along with a real world study and I can’t agree more with him. You can’t just put all the ingredients at once and expect the dish to come out well, there always has to be a right process to follow, without which the dish won’t just magically turn out delicious, ending up in a disaster more often than not.
