“Groupthink: The brainstorming myth.”
“Your Creative Power” was published in 1948. An amalgam of pop science and business anecdote, it became a surprise best-seller. Osborn promised that, by following his advice, the typical reader could double his creative output. Such a mental boost would spur career success — “To get your foot in the door, your imagination can be an open-sesame” — and also make the reader a much happier person. “The more you rub your creative lamp, the more alive you feel,” he wrote.
“Your Creative Power” was filled with tricks and strategies, such as always carrying a notebook, to be ready when inspiration struck. But Osborn’s most celebrated idea was the one discussed in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.” When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm,” which means “using the brain to storm a creative problem — and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.” …
The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work…
According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.”… In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” Nemeth says. “It wakes us right up.”…
The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right — enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways — the group dynamic will take care of itself.”
I think that this really comes down to the way that humans in a group create social interactions that can be overwhelming — if the setting is one in which there is a very particular culture, that culture needs to be present in the nature and presentation of the ideas (and people who are outside of the culture have to do a lot of translating before they act); if there are hierarchies or rocky relationships or one person is really hungry and just wants to get the meeting over with, those are all introduced as complications.
However, sometimes we get to be part of magical groups where we form a supportive community that is more than the sum of its parts and where the culture isn’t limiting or asking anyone to code-switch, and then I would suspect that brainstorming is super effective. It’s probably also something that just naturally occurs, instead of having to be artificially announced and structured
