Conventional wisdom
Noun:
The generally accepted belief or opinion about a particular matter. Conventional wisdom may be proven to be untrue.
Example: It is widely believed that before the voyage of Christopher Colobus most people thought that the world was flat. This is however not true. The myth of the flat earth
Brainstorming
What do you do when you need a novel solution? The answer is obvious, you hold a brainstorming session. I’ve been doing them for 30 years. I’ve brainstormed everything from “What frozen poultry product could we sell?” to “How can we process more credit card applications?”
Brainstorming was first suggested in 1957 by Alex Osborn in his book Applied Imagination. He proposed it as a way of getting groups to come up with ideas.
The rules of a good brainstorming session are very simple:
- Produce as many ideas as possible
- Build on each other’s ideas
- The wackier the idea the better
- Do not evaluate until after you have finished generating ideas
Brainstorming is common place, I can vouch for its existence in frozen chicken factories and banks and I’m prepared to lay a chunky bet that the approach is used pretty much everywhere else as well.
How does brainstorming work?
The beauty of brainstorming is that it is easy to understand how it works:
- Two heads are better than one
- We have all had different experiences
- New ideas come from combining old ones
Alex Osborne claimed that “The average person can think of twice as many ideas when working with a group than when working alone.”
Four simple rules, some intuitive logic and a 100% uplift in ideas generated. It is no surprise brainstorming took off.
Not so wise…
Unfortunately Mr Osborn was wrong.
A year after making his claim a group of psychologists ran a test to see if brainstorming really did double idea generation. They set up two teams of people and asked them to brainstorm the advantages and disadvantages of having two thumbs on each hand.
One team followed the classic brainstorming approach, working together to generate a list of ideas. The other team… well they weren’t a team, it was just people sitting in separate rooms writing down their ideas. There was no contact between them at all, no cross fertilisation or sharing of experiences, just a stream of whatever came into their heads.
The individual’s ideas were de-duped (if two people had the same idea it was only counted once) and combined. The final list was then compared with the list created by the traditional method. The psychologists found that the group of 4 individuals produced twice as many ideas as the team of 4 people.
Or to put it another way, brainstorming doesn’t enhance creativity, it destroys it.
Why is conventional wisdom wrong?
In 1987 Diehl and Strobbe carried out a literature search. They found that the experiment had been repeated, one way or another, twenty-five times. The individuals always generated more ideas than the group, invariably by a margin of 100%.
Being good scientists Diehl and Strobbe asked themselves why? They came up with 3 theories:
- Free Riders — some people sit in sessions drinking tea whilst keeping their mouths shut
- Fear — some people are so worried what others think about their ideas they are scared to share them
- Forgetfulness — some people simply forget their ideas whilst they are listening to others
It turns out that some of us are lazy and others are shy but we are all forgetful. Our short-term memory can only hold four or five ideas at anyone time. Whilst your boss is pontificating about his idea and you are nodding your head pretending to agree, you have had ten other ideas and forgotten eight of them.
An alternative
Brainstorming in groups doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean you should stop. Change the rules slightly. First ask the contributors to sit by themsleves for fifteen minutes writing down all their ideas. Then run a conventional session so people can build on each other’s thoughts.
This approach has two benefits:
- You will generate twice as many ideas
- The holder of the session has to write down the issue ahead of time which will force them to be clearer
As for conventional wisdom…
If brainstorming destroys creativity rather than enhancing it, how effective are our other beliefs?
- You must have a budgeting process
- SMART goals are essential
- Resource should be 100% utilised
- You need more management bench strength
- You should strive to have the “best people”…
All these management beliefs are widely accepted as the best way to do things, until, of course, they are not.
Could you test something else instead?
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Read another opinion
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Either your opinions are self evidently true or just hauntingly similar to my own.
Either way, I always love reading your stuff.
Thank you Michael, what is it they say about wise men and fools? :)
So it seems I have always broken the rules with brainstorming sessions :-). I was introduced to the technique by a very clever person who said idea gen is for silent contemplation and evaluation / idea reforming is a group activity.
Thank you Steve, glad you liked it
Hi James, really enjoyed reading your post. I’ve been doing individual idea generation in a group environment – not every time but often.
Having worked with MBTI for many years, I know that Introverts need time, space and quiet to think so traditional brainstorming doesn’t meet their preference. It can be tough for Extraverts to do this silent thought capture but they get to work with their preference when all the individual ideas are on post-it notes and ready to discuss.
The points you raise in your post about forgetfulness and fear of looking stupid gives me additional reasoning to continue with the individual idea generation before group discussion.
Interesting distinction.
I guess one size fits all is never a great idea.
Thank you for reading.