Group brainstorming is a waste of time (2015)
hbr.org
hbr.org
Small groups where everyone knows each other and are skilled at communication, experienced at problem-solving with each other, and don't have psychological safety issues--- sure, they can brainstorm together and stimulate creative thinking.
I expect that what the hbr guy has in mind is a table of shark-like MBA's, each with something to prove, hide, or vanquish. Yeah, that's not good for a brainstorming session, it will just become a feeding frenzy.
If you're in a business environment where you have a team where everyone isn't trying to make sure they have an opportunity to get paid more than you, receive a promotion before you, have their idea "win" for RDD, or have more job security when resourcss are tight, then count your blessings.
I've worked in these environments and you can truly innovate, it's marvelous and fun even if the work is challenging. It requires teams who are understanding of one another, have humility, and are shielded by some manager or business policy who/that allows for this sort of dynamic. It's pretty rare, unfortunately.
My kids sometimes feel like they've made life changing and important decisions when in reality I just gave them a choice between two pairs of shoes to go to the park.
The tech equivalent is owning a small product at a big company, feels like you're the man but the CEO doesn't give a toss and you're not strategic.
I've been through that revelation myself and used it as motivation to up my game. The fact you jumpes up my arse just because I said something that you consider unkind really highlights the lack of diversity in thought in your life. Maybe you're surrounded by yes men and you yourself cannot handle competitive behaviours either.
I had both lucrative and productive brainstorming sessions and also messy ones on different teams and companies.
In my experience at an advertising agency “Making people feel good” was the best result of brainstorming, but certainly not the only one. Everyone had a chance to voice their ideas and offer feedback on other ideas. In the end the ideas usually ended up coming from the people who were great at making ideas, and the tactical executions of those ideas came from the people who were good at making ideas come to life, and sometimes they combined to make an even better idea and execution.
As a creative leader I also required each person involved in the brainstorm to do individual work beforehand. Perhaps this is why we saw good results.
Either way, measuring brainstorming success by number of ideas or some other measure of “creativity” is likely missing out on the social benefits of the process.
I'll buy that on average, brainstorming is an inefficient way to improve the quality of a product, especially if all members of the team are reasonably knowledgeable about the subject. But as the article mentions, that's often not the case.
It may not always or even often result in a better product, but there's definitely value in finding those outlier projects where you can save time and money with an approach that would be obvious to someone with more familiarity with the subject. It's hard to know if this is the case beforehand, so it may be a sensible default to hold a short brainstorming session for any project so your team at least has the opportunity to identify areas for improvement.
Edit: formatting
This is overlooked. There's an inherent assumption with brainstorming that you start from nothing and form ideas. The issue is that you need some context around what you're generating ideas for to shape them. It also helps to have time to shape these ideas before sharing them, even at the "first stage." This allows everyone time to form some early ideas and shape them in a way they can easily express them so others understand the vision and can iterate, mutate, etc. around a solid understanding around the shape of the context. You don't need weeks but at least an evening to casually/informally think over things is typically enough.
If you dont do this, you get some initial thoughts with a lack of any data and everyone asking lots of questions around context instead of forming ideas around the context. Essentially, you spend time finding the cursory data you need to have a proper brainstorming session. Then you get ideas that had no time to form. People can typically generate ideas and iterate out sets of bad ideas themselves. The remaining potentially good ideas are the ones perfect for a brainstorming session. From my experience, this is where valuable group brainstorming starts and takes on a life of its own.
This is my experience. It's difficult to get under the surface of a problem in a committee. Better to take the same group, state the issue, then ask everyone to separately go on a long walk and think about it. Then come back and perform group memetic meiosis on the solutions.
Note that this will only work in small groups, like 3-5 people or so.
One way of dealing with this problem is to do Anonymous Brainstorming https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=2579
The idea, in a nutshell, is that there is a facilitator. The members of the team do not meet in person. They send their ideas to the facilitator, who aggregates the ideas and sends the complete list out to the members of the team. This is intended to remove the social effects that might interfere with some of the team members participating fully, or other members dominating the process because of their perceived position in the hierarchy, or their better social skills.
An advanced version of this involves rounds; everybody sends their ideas to the facilitator, the complete list goes out to everybody, the members critique or support some of the ideas, the facilitator adds the new input and sends the revised list back out to the team, and the process repeats (presumably until there is some agreement on the best idea(s), or everybody gets tired if doing it).
My recollection is that this process can be very effective at problem solving, but it certainly isn't as quick as getting a bunch of people in a room to hash out some ideas.
Often when a brainstorm session is run in a way where everyone's work is immediately visible to everone else people get anchored early and miss out on good ideas.
This could be as simple as everyone spending a few mins jotting down their ideas separately before sharing them in a group chat, or on a whiteboard.
The article doesn’t claim there isn’t any way to get creative ideas out of larger groups, it claims that Osborn’s method of doing it isn’t a good one.
"Why do so many incompetent men become leaders?"
https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men
I read article years ago and I couldn't find it until just now.
Just like casual water cooler conversations result in ideas that wouldn't have seen the light of day otherwise (and this is why office design is important too!).
All this stuff matters. There's different ways to go about it (and different methods can accomplish similar goals), but to blanket declare brainstorming generally as placebo with no effect is just wrong in my view.
There is nothing more rewarding to me having worked in IT than being able to collaborate with others.
This is not about getting a project done, or building.
This is more about looking back on the course of my career and realizing the only important things are the fellowships gained throughout, otherwise, its all just IT shit, at the end of the day, anyway.
[0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB...
The value of brainstorming is mainly the suspension of criticism, and it's an important part of any creative task, even if applied alone. I see it all the time--a very smart person with lots of aptitude who can't write, can't draw, can't code, can't do anything because any small attempt is immediately "not good enough".
The suspension of criticism is necessary in order to push through. You can't run from the problems forever, but I do think that making some shitty version of something before you make a good version is... necessary? You never really know what you are doing until the shitty version exists and you can see the problems, and subsequently the solutions.
I tend to think that this even happens mentally to groups. We start to think slower when we are in a group of other people. I guess this is why discussions on social events also ends up on subjects like celebrities and sports rather than abstract philosophical topics.
We could have been a couple of iterations into a real solution by now (this is hardware+software) rather than being nowhere while everyone understands what they don't understand and finally understands that what we said five months ago was the correct path.
Rather than being critical, sometimes one needs to realize that people and organizations, at times, require going through a process before accepting reality or agreeing with a conclusion. I've seen this many times during my career, from simple problems to designs that are currently orbiting our planet.
It's unfortunate because it burns time, money and valuable human capital (people could be doing far more valuable things).
The hub-and-spoke model was used at AT&T labs, where individuals or small teams descend into "spokes" to do deep work, then return to a "hub" to synthesize results and plan future directions.
You also need solid leadership to provide direction and organization, although I suppose there's exceptions to that rule like Valve's holocracy. I'd be curious how something like the Manhattan Project was organized.
When I took it a few years back all my skills were clumped into strategy, which might explain why just doing strategy isn't necessary a way to get things done and may be a waste of time if done to excess.
I was involved in an expert witness report a number of years back which involved going through a bunch of depositions. I remember reading through the deposition of one senior executive who was basically asked "But your corporate strategy office said this initiative was important. Are you saying you disagree?" And his response was basically that the corporate strategy office writes a lot of things [that I don't pay much mind to].
Primary take-away relevant to this situation is to have independent thought, and to have independent voicing/collecting of ideas.
It's rather dangerous for a 'leader' of the group to express an opinion, only to have everyone confirm so as to score points.
Crowds are terrible at being creative whether they are lead by a person or not.
A friend of mine has been running an Oscar contest for years and I grabbed some data from him a few years ago. We knew that "consensus" did well but I actually did some graphs and analysis; it's pretty striking: https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-predicti...
Undergrad, we were were both on the movie committee where we had an attendance-guessing contest that had similar results.
But... outside of some very specific and often artificial circumstances where the effect is very robust. It doesn't really work.
That example from the book was meant to illustrate (as I understood it) that you can aggregate individual thoughts on complex subjects and arrive at a useful conclusion that may be closer to the truth than any individual alone.
I shared my comment in response to a claim that brainstorming is a waste of time. It is definitely the case that certain ways to aggregate people's thoughts (e.g. "groupthink") can be worse than having a well-informed individual solve the problem. What I believe _is_ possible is to combine ideas of a group of people to get better results that choosing just a few "smart" individuals to make the decision.
A far analogy is the voting system in the US. Because we don't have Approval Voting or RCV / IRV (Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting) we now have a 2 party system where 3rd parties can have deleterious effects. The way you aggregate REALLY matters.
With my teams, we'll meet, chat about a problem, go out separate ways for a while, then regroup. Or, we'll send one expert off to do some solo thinking/analysis, and bring it back and we'll all discuss it, then send that person off again. Which way depends on the problem and the individuals involved.
L'esprit de l'escalier.
Social loafing: There’s a tendency – also known as free riding – for people to make less of an effort when they are working in teams than alone. As with the bystander effect, we feel less propelled to do something when we know other people might do it.
Social anxiety: People worry about other team members’ views of their ideas. This is also referred to as evaluation apprehension. Similarly, when team members perceive that others have more expertise, their performance declines. This is especially problematic for introverted and less confident individuals.
Regression to the mean: This is the process of downward adjustment whereby the most talented group members end up matching the performance of their less talented counterparts. This effect is well known in sports – if you practice with someone less competent than you, your competence level declines and you sink to the mediocrity of your opponent.
Production blocking: No matter how large the group, individuals can only express a single idea at one time if they want other group members to hear them. Studies have found that the number of suggestions plateaus with more than six or seven group members, and that the number of ideas per person declines as group size increases.
This sentiment has been echoed by other posters here and I believe it to be clutch. Generally speaking I loath any meeting that does not include an agenda/context so I can prepare for it(even if just mentally).
Also, large reason is that with paper I second guess myself more and anticipate or prepare for possible negative reaction.
When I see that the group dynamic is good right now, I have less reason to be careful and get more free.
The special sauce was asserting a commitment to psychological safety.
However, now brainstorming has become a corporate cliché, and actually allowing new ideas is scary, so we all understand when people ask for "brainstorming" they mean just bring up every mediocre idea you can think of that's not too offensive.
There are few times in my life, where brainstorming would get me where I wanted to go.