16 Feb Brainstorming is Broken: There’s a Better Way

You must unlearn what you have learned.

                                                                                                                                                                                 Yoda, Return of the Jedi

Faced with a new problem, a new burning issue, what’s our default response? Corral the team into a meeting room, madly discuss the problem, throw ideas onto the whiteboard, go back to the problem, keep verbalizing possible solutions, get sidetracked by “nay-sayers”, ……… round and round we go. At the end of the session, some are excited and energized. You’ve chosen a few solutions to pursue.

Based on the solution(s) chosen, or the litany of solutions brainstormed, how do you know you were successful? How do you know the session uncovered the best solution? Did only the extroverts do the talking? Did you just rehash and reword existing ideas?

Brainstorming doesn’t work because of*

• Social Loafing – not everyone participates equally. Some are happy to hang back.
• Social Anxiety – people worry about being judged or for not having enough subject matter authority, so they stay quiet.
• Regression to the Mean – the top players will make themselves small, reducing their performance to match the majority.
• Production Blocking – when relying on verbal expression of ideas, you can only state one idea at a time where everyone can hear you. The more people in the room, the harder it is to be heard.

When brainstorming was first touted in 1948 by Alex Osborn as the best way to unleash a team’s creativity, teams were ecstatic, dripping with positive feedback. The practice took off. However, a Yale study from 1958 proved brainstorming doesn’t work and, in fact, it has the opposite effect of making team members less creative.

There’s a better way.

Step One: Write it down

Don’t use an open forum where people shout out their ideas. That can be soul-crushing for some and a complete non-starter for others. Instead, use brainwriting. Ask each team member to silently write down their ideas, one idea per stickie note. This is a silent, no sharing, activity. This gives everyone one time and space to get their ideas out without fear nor influence.

Step Two: Share

Ask each team member to verbally share each of their ideas and randomly place them on the board. Discussion is welcomed if it’s to clarify an idea.

Step Three: Categorize

When leading a team through this exercise, I joke this is the hardest part. Ask everyone to come to the board and silently group similar ideas. No discussion, no debate. We’re simply grouping at this stage.

Step Four: Name it & Debate it

One person leads the group in discussion to clearly label the idea groupings the team created. This is where debate and discussion happen. Only this time, it’s targeted to one idea at a time. You may also uncover new ideas. This is ok.

For true innovation, we still need each other. Studies show that criticism and debate are essential. “Criticism allows people to dig below the surface of the imagination and come up with collective ideas that aren’t predictable,” by Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, January 23, 2012.

Step Five:  Choose & Move

There are a few ways you can choose the winning idea: 1. A person of authority makes the final decision; 2. The team votes; or 3. The team votes AND the person of authority chooses. If you chose option 2 or 3, give each team member more than one vote, say three to six votes each. They can vote more than once on a favourite idea. Giving this many votes takes some of the pressure off and adds some anonymity. The idea(s) with the top vote wins. If the person of authority is making the decision (option 3), they now see and hear where the team’s passion lies. They don’t have to pick the top voted. They chose what they feel is best and the team feels heard.

Now you can get down to business. Take that top idea(s) and create an action plan.

Everyone on your team got to voice their ideas. The team came together with healthy, targeted discussion all to achieve actionable results.

If you give this a go, let me know how you make out. This is one of my favourite exercises and have had multitudes of success with it.

Caveat: make sure you take time, in the beginning, to really identify the problem. Never underestimate the time this will take and the time it will save. This topic will likely be a future blog post: exercises to clearly identify a problem.

*Adopted from “Why Group Brainstorming is a Waste of Time,” by Thomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Harvard Business Review, March 25, 2015.