What I don't like about this article is that they had a hypothesis and then they found some studies. I don't feel like this is written from their own experience and on the contrary so many of the responses are much more derived from experience. Throwing cold water on brain storming might be a good idea but I still feel there's a lot to be gained from the types of brain storming I've been involved with that really seems to amplify the brainpower in the room. For me at least, the group scenario really galvanizes some ideas that were just floating around previously.
Stop Brainstorming
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Re: Stop Brainstorming
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came here to write this, and also to say that on a software team, for example, where the problem is complex, no one person may have a well rounded enough or deep enough grasp of the problem, goals, limitations, etc. to come up with an optimal solution on their own. This is why we have businesses in the first place, to organize teams in a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts kind of way. A very basic example of this mi…
I think we use the term "brain storming" in different ways, engineering teams coming together to flesh out an idea is often nothing like a "brainstorming" session. Engineering often tends to do "cooperative brain leveraging" :)
Yeah, brainstorming has put a bad name on collaborating next to a whiteboard with pens and post-its.
Brainstorming tries to achieve an unstructured creative session whereas engineering teams are trying to flesh out a structured plan to a complex problem.
Not all whiteboarding in a group is brainstorming. The former usually results in tremendous added value while with the latter I agree it's mostly pointless.
Re: Stop Brainstorming
#83The article does not distinguish between some badly prepared corpo rituals with power plays and gathering half-baked ideas from the members of the project.
I strongly prefer to have draft quality periodic reports/memos to be read by the team members than a tons of crappy Jira issues gathering dust and spreading confusion.
Re: Stop Brainstorming
#84> Ideas are best developed by individuals
Totally agree with it. Thanks for sharing.
Re: Stop Brainstorming
#85This sounds like a postmodern takedown of the possibility of meaningful collaboration. Sure it's hard but it's not fundamentally impossible.
Re: Stop Brainstorming
#86“A team meeting was hastily called and we embarked on ‘brainstorming’, an American business technique in which ideas are graded depending on how loudly they’re shouted”
Alan Partidge
Re: Stop Brainstorming
#87For me brainstorming has nothing to do with generating ideas or solutions. I see it as an activation tool. You prime up your brain before doing the actual thinking.
Re: Stop Brainstorming
#88I think this article is a good critique of the current "fast-food" like brainstorming session many people/companies are running.
I name them fast-food-like because most of the brainstorming sessions are something like "Let's have a 1-hour meeting and brainstorm some ideas". It is expecting people to go in a creative flow instantly after the meeting has started and also feel psychologically safe when entering the room/zoom call. No preparation made, no group forming, nothing to actually prepare the meeting. It is a pure form of wanting to just get ideas as fast as possible from participants' brains.
I strongly recommend anyone to read the "Applied Immagination" book by Osborn. It is where he (first) talked at large about brain storming sessions. Can be read freely on the Internet Archive Open Library.
I will just give here three important points from that book, where Osborn talk about how to organise such sessions.
First, it talks about the importance of facilitators. Here are the requirements Osborn had for facilitators:
- Should ask stimulating questions
- Should have plans for guiding the generation of ideas
- Should provide warm-up exercises
- Should teach and reinforce the guidelines
- Should do the planning and scheduling of follow-up sessions
Then, it talks about the profile of the participant: should be a self-starter and should have experience with the matter/area related to the brainstorming subject.
And then it lays out how the session should be organised:
1. Preparation of the type of the problem to be approached
2. Send a one-page background and invitation memo to participants describing the task to be solved with some example of the type of ideas desired
3. Individual ideation should be done by each participant on their own in advance before the group session
4. Group brainstorming session - with the duration between 30 and 45 minutes
5. Follow-up individual ideation should happen again after the group session
As one can notice doing such brainstorming sessions as designed by Osborn is very different that what we see normally in a company/organization where someone just sends an invite with the title "Brainstorming about new feature/solution for ..." and then expects people to come and be creative.
As a side note, I also recommend reading The Art of Thought by Graham Wallace. While the psychology of creativity has done many advanced in the last 100 years, his book has still defined the general concept for what people now call creative problem-solving.
I read both books and I managed to publish a summary of the Art of Thought on my blog, but not on the Applied Imagination by Osborn. Hope to find time for this soon.
Re: Stop Brainstorming
#89I think the article’s missing an important trick: Brainstorming establishes a shared understanding (depending on the group dynamics, you might call it a fiction) that the group , not any individual, came up with the idea. That sense of ownership is psychologically important for aligning the group during the execution phase: People are usually a lot more motivated to implement a plan that they came up with, and if any…
The devil is as usual in (execution) details. One man's brainstorming is another man's committee.
Re: Stop Brainstorming
#90The problem isn't brainstorming, as codeflo said, it's important trick that brainstorming establishes a shared understanding that the group came up with the idea.
The problem is what is coming after brainstorming, the execution is the problem. We all have ideas, individually and as a group, but after idea is born, validation and executions are next crucial steps. Then you can conclude that you had a successful brainstorming.