Are Group Brainstorms Stifling Your Team’s Creativity?
Learn how to unlock your team’s innovative potential
Approximately 70% of employers believe creative thinking is the most in-demand skill for 2024. This prompts a question: How do organizations foster creative thinking?
One common way is through brainstorm sessions. Sooner or later every team gathers in the conference room to work together on hashing out some creative solutions for a pressing problem.
The normal structure for such a session is an icebreaker (which no one really wants to do) to warm up the participants, then a framing of the problem to align with what the group is trying to solve. This is then followed by the use of a collaboration tool like a whiteboard with sticky notes to document, iterate on, and begin organizing ideas.
The standard outputs from a day of gathering everyone together are a few ideas presented by the most senior and/or outspoken people in the room, which ultimately trump any other more “far-fetched” ideas pitched. The prevailing ideas are iterated on by the group to create perceived consensus and shared ownership, and then tasks are delegated to drive progress on the new ideas.
Unfortunately, this approach is incredibly inefficient for at least seven different reasons, as listed below. Thankfully, three simple solutions can help counteract creativity detractors and drive more productive group brainstorms.
Why brainstorms are broken
1. Recency bias
Problems and their impacts are often multifaceted, but when only a limited number of people are part of a brainstorming session, understanding the breadth of the issue is a challenge.
In the absence of third-party context or data to consider, it’s natural to default to the recency bias, which is to say the last time you experienced a problem similar to the problem at hand, the way you felt or reacted must be representative of the general population. Making decisions based on a small sample size can lead to dangerous blind spots. The common alternative is conducting customer interviews or surveys, but those are expensive, time-consuming, and not always accurate — especially when soliciting customer feedback on new ideas customers can’t experience yet.
2. Personal perception bias
When a group gathers to brainstorm, there are at least two levels of assessment taking place: the quality of the ideas presented, and the perception of the person presenting the idea. It’s an inherent human trait to consider a message in the context of its messenger, as evidenced by most teenagers’ varied receptivity to the same message from a respected coach or teacher versus a parent.
Introducing a new idea can come with perceived reputation risk, especially for more junior team members with less established credibility in the group. It’s much safer to try and build on an idea introduced by someone with significant credibility. This is an unfortunate loss of creativity for the group because, when it comes to brainstorming, the inexperience of a junior team member can actually be the group’s greatest asset. Inexperience equates to fewer limiting beliefs and preconceived notions about the state of the business (also known as strategic ignorance).
3. Creative cliff fallacy
It’s natural to think of creative energy like physical energy: the more you use, the less you have. When groups gather and a moderately creative idea is introduced, it becomes the standard by which other creative ideas are judged, and it’s tempting for a mental blocker to arise that no other more creative ideas can be conceived.
In reality, quality often comes out of quantity, and research shows the more time we invest in thinking creatively, the more creative we become. For example, invest one minute to observe and document 10 characteristics of a nearby object. Then challenge yourself to observe 20 additional characteristics. It’s easy to believe 10 is an exhaustive list, until new insights are unearthed with a greater commitment to creativity.
4. Sunk cost fallacy
Similar to the creative cliff fallacy, the sunk cost fallacy is a group’s belief that after investing time in an idea, it would be more efficient to continue the momentum of building out the current idea than to start over with a new one, especially if there’s already group consensus on the idea at hand.
It can easily come across as contrarian in a brainstorming session to suggest pivoting away from a promising idea to see what else the group can create. However, in light of the creative cliff fallacy, the true sunk cost is leveraging time as a group to only focus on the first few ideas that are introduced.
5. Introversion versus extroversion
This group bias is more commonly understood — but still rarely accounted for. Confidence does not equate to competence, but often the loudest or first ideas introduced by extroverts are the only ones the group has time to discuss, and extroverts exert their opinions on shaping the few presented ideas while the group is together. So introverts have to unnaturally force themselves into the conversation, or have their ideas go unheard. Even with a facilitator giving space for introverts to share their opinions, after having heard passionate extroverts present, introverts may feel less inclined to share.
6. The blank canvas problem (aka the on-demand-creativity fallacy)
Many facilitated brainstorming sessions have an awkward moment of silence when the icebreaker is completed, the group is sitting in front of an empty whiteboard, and the facilitator opens up the room for ideas. Asking someone to come up with ideas on demand is like asking someone to be funny on the spot. It’s possible, but difficult. Once one brave soul throws out the first idea, it’s easier for others to expand on it, but then the group can quickly fall into the aforementioned sunk cost fallacy.
7. Universal attribution error
Related to the personal perception bias, the universal attribution bias takes place when an individual defines their abilities in the context of someone else’s, based on limited interactions in a brainstorming session. For example, if someone introduces three great ideas to kick off a brainstorm, it would be easy for the rest of the group to just lean on the established “creative person” to continue leading the creativity.
Then others can try to carve out another niche, such as the cross-examiner or the idea builder. Of course, most brainstorms are not a competition with mutually exclusive group roles, but it’s natural to think in terms of defining ourselves and others by a single characteristic — like high school superlatives.
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How to fix brainstorming sessions
1. Provide a variety of lateral-thinking prompts
Lateral thinking is finding connections in seemingly disparate concepts to create a net new concept. Providing frequent and diverse prompts to inspire lateral thought is valuable for counteracting the recency bias (thinking in terms of one’s own experiences), the creative cliff fallacy (the belief that all the creative ideas have already been discovered), and the fundamental attribution error (abdicating your role in ideation because someone else is “more creative”).
If prompts continue changing and reframing the brainstorm’s context, the full range of the group’s perspectives can be leveraged on different topics, without getting stuck on any one concept. There are a variety of methods to help spark lateral-thinking connections, including intentionally introducing random elements, imagining processes without key steps, or considering best practices from cross-industry leaders.
2. Document and hide past ideas
It’s common in brainstorming sessions to document ideas on sticky notes and place them on a wall or board for the duration of a workshop. This approach has a few shortcomings. It not only makes it difficult to contextualize the note later when someone is trying to interpret everyone’s handwriting and remember the larger conversation the sticky note represented, but the visual cue also makes it harder for a group to move past a good idea and continue ideating (the sunk cost fallacy), which shortchanges the most creative ideas (the creative cliff fallacy).
Ideally, idea documentation includes metadata like who introduced the idea (so you can follow up for additional context later), when the idea was introduced (to understand the context of previous ideas discussed), and the prompts sparking the idea (to continue building on the same concepts later).
Hiding past ideas may feel counterintuitive since one idea can spark another, but replacing past ideas with new prompts enables a greater variety of ideation and prevents the brainstorming from fixating on a specific concept. Idea execution is a valuable but separate exercise from idea generation. If the two are misconstrued, exploring the most innovative ideas will be lost in the easier exercise of building a body of evidence for how more straightforward ideas can be implemented.
3. Extend brainstorms past in-person sessions
Humans are most creative in the subconscious brain; your subconscious continues to process what your conscious mind has already experienced. You’ve experienced this if you’ve ever had a moment brushing your teeth or taking a shower where the perfect comeback or answer to an event from earlier in the day suddenly comes to mind. If ideas are only considered that come to mind during a live brainstorming session, the group will miss out on the power of subconscious thought, as well as risk losing ideas from introverts and team members concerned about hurting their personal brands on a new idea (personal perception bias).
Of course, an open invitation for additional ideas following a brainstorming session likely will not lead to follow-through for busy teams. So, as with most asynchronous requests, set a deadline and expectation for contribution, with a specific topic to focus additional independent ideation.
Next steps
Humans have an immense amount of potential for creativity from a lifetime of unique experiences and perspectives, and bringing multiple people together can either multiply or divide that creative potential. Brainstorm sessions may generate ideas by gathering people together to solve a problem, but intentional framing is required to avoid common biases and maximize the innovative quantity and quality of ideas.
In a rapidly changing world, the future belongs to organizations that consistently generate creative solutions to both internal and external problems. To aid in creative problem-solving, check out the brainstorm platform we built to help your team brainstorm better.
Slalom is a next-generation professional services company creating value at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity. Learn more and reach out today.
