Brainstorming doesn’t work
Every so often I learn something that challenges something I’ve (almost always unconsciously) held as a fundamental truth. For me, it was a fundamental truth that group activities such as brainstorming are more effective than individual efforts in creative exploration of an issue.
I’m sure the “fundamentalness” of this truth is largely due to the ubiquity of group think in business. People constantly have meetings, and brainstorm, and attempt to arrive at consensus. But it turns out that brainstorming is not only unproductive, it’s very unproductive:
There are a number of explanations for productivity loss in brainstorming groups. Participants may be unwilling to state some of their ideas because they are afraid of being negatively evaluated. Social loafing or free-riding may occur because individuals do not feel accountable or feel their efforts are not needed by the group. Production blocking may result because individuals cannot express their ideas when someone else is talking. Evaluation apprehension, free-riding, and production blocking insure that interactive groups start off rather slowly in the idea-generation process. By means of social comparison processes and a tendency toward downward comparison, this low level of performance may become normative and be maintained throughout the group session or in subsequent sessions even when evaluation apprehension or production blocking may no longer be a problem.
What’s really amazing about this isn’t that brainstorming has been shown as ineffective per se, but that brainstorming remains ubiquitous even through there is so much research about its ineffectiveness (just check out the references section in the paper quoted above). Research that goes back decades. And it’s not just a matter of the research being poorly understood: It turns out that people fully aware of the research (such as psychologists) continue to brainstorm anyway.
The answer, I believe, is that people are fundamentally social: the hard-wired drive to work together as a team is much more powerful than an intellectual knowledge that group-think has many pitfalls. There are techniques designed to overcome the limitations of brainstorming, however; the most popular of which seems to be the unfortunately-named brainwriting.
Brainwriting boils down to brainstorming using written notes instead of speaking, thus creating a kind of anonymity designed to overcome the various social obstacles that limit truly creative thinking. It strikes me that participants in such an exercise are likely to fall victim to Penny Arcade’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, to wit: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.
So, brainstorming doesn’t work, but we can’t stop doing it, and using alternative techniques just highlights the assholes in the group. What does this mean? I dunno. Perhaps despair is in order.
Email: chris(at)chrishoover(dot)org
