The Problem With Brainstorming
Brainstorming was introduced and popularized by Alex Osborn, an executive at a respected advertising firm, in his 1953 book Applied Imagination. He believed brainstorming was the lynchpin underlying creativity and wanted to share his company’s process with the world. To help put this book into context, it’s similar to what we see today with Ed Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc. about Pixar’s creative process or Tom Kelley’s The Art of Innovation about how the leading design firm IDEO works. Like Pixar and IDEO today, people admired Osborn’s creative success, and brainstorming spread quickly.
Osborn outlined four rules for brainstorming. One, focus on quantity. In other words, generate as many ideas as you can. Two, defer judgment, and separate idea generation from idea evaluation. Three, welcome unusual ideas. And four, combine and improve ideas. He suggested that groups come together real-time, face-to-face (remember he predated the digital, asynchronous communication tools we have today), to generate ideas together, using these four rules. For those of you who have participated in brainstorming sessions, these rules aren’t new. They are still in common use today.
As brainstorming rose in popularity, academic researchers started to question if it worked. Was brainstorming in groups the most effective way to generate ideas? For decades researchers ran studies in which they compared the creative output of brainstorming groups against the creative output of the same number of individuals generating ideas alone. Study after study found that the individuals generating ideas alone outperformed the brainstorming groups. Individuals generated more ideas, more diverse ideas, and more original ideas.38
As researchers dug into why individuals outperformed groups, they identified four mitigating factors. First, research has found that people tend to work harder when working individually than when working in groups. This is called social loafing. When we are on our own, we have no choice but to put in the work, whereas when we are in a group, we can rely on the efforts of others.
Second, brainstorming groups exhibited many of the common challenges associated with group conformity. The early ideas set the tone for later ideas. Ideas were often too conservative or similar to each other. Members censored their ideas due to concerns about how others would judge their ideas.
Third, brainstorming groups ran into challenges with production blocking—that’s a fancy term for a simple idea. Have you ever been about to say something when someone else jumped in, prompting you to forget what you were going to say? That’s production blocking. In group brainstorming sessions, people lose ideas amid the chaos of everyone sharing ideas in rapid succession.
And finally, the fourth factor is a common group trait known as downward norm setting—the performance of the group tends to be limited to the lowest-performing member. Rather than the strongest member raising everyone else up, the opposite happens. The weakest member brings everyone else down. These factors combined to inhibit the performance of the brainstorming groups as compared to the individuals who generated ideas alone.39
This raises the question: Why are brainstorming advocates so adamant that brainstorming works? It turns out researchers have an answer to this question as well. Bernard Nijstad and colleagues at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that brainstorming groups are subject to what they call “the illusion of group productivity.”40 This is a phenomenon in which groups overestimate their performance. They also report high levels of satisfaction with their work despite their lesser performance.
Nijstad and colleagues attribute this overestimation to a reduction in cognitive failures. They define a “cognitive failure” as occurring when a participant can’t generate any ideas. When you are brainstorming alone, you generate more cognitive failures than when you are brainstorming in a group. Ideas from the group help other group members get unstuck.
But even with this group advantage, individuals generating ideas alone still generated more ideas, more diverse ideas, and more original ideas than brainstorming groups. The individuals simply had to work harder to get there. However, since the brainstorming groups spent less time stuck, their perception was that their performance was higher. This illusion of group productivity may explain why so many brainstorming advocates consider it a panacea.
So, if we stick to what the research tells us, individuals generating ideas on their own do outperform brainstorming groups. Even if we think brainstorming is effective, we are probably falling prey to the illusion of group productivity. Working in a group feels easier, so we think we must be performing at a higher level. Now, if you are wondering if there is a way to get the benefit of reducing cognitive failures that we see in groups with the creative output of individuals brainstorming on their own, it turns out there is.
Runa Korde and Paul Paulus, researchers at the University of Texas-Arlington, ran a series of studies that showed alternating between individual ideation and group sharing of ideas can improve the quality of ideas generated in subsequent individual ideation sessions.41 Exposure to other people’s ideas did inspire new ideas.
The key difference here is that individuals still generated ideas on their own. Participants started by ideating on their own. Then they shared their ideas with the group. Then they went back to ideating on their own. They never ideated as a group, but they received the benefit of hearing each other’s ideas. You’ll see in the methods described below that we’ll be putting this same pattern into practice.