Why Brainstorming inhibits creativity and innovation

Andy McComments off.

Brainstorming seems to be part of every manager and leaders toolkit and undoubtedly, for many situations, brainstorming is a useful tool – however brainstorming is often utilised to encourage innovation but is it really the way to encourage creative thinking in 2018?

Merriam-Webster defines brainstorming as: a group problem-solving technique that involves the spontaneous contribution of ideas from all members of the group; ALSO :  the mulling over of ideas by one or more individuals in an attempt to devise or find a solution to a problem

Brainstorming, in its current form and by many metrics, doesn’t work as well as the frequency of “team brainstorming meetings” would suggest it does.  In fact, brainstorming is extremely out of touch with the latest science of how the brain actually works, Columbia Business School professor William Duggan is an expert in intuition and innovation and the author of a new book entitled Creative Strategy recently told  the Ideas@Work publication;

I was surprised to discover that 99 percent of innovation methods that people use today are based on a model of the brain that neuroscientists abandoned more than a decade ago. In essence, these innovation methods tell you to do some kind of research or analysis, and then you brainstorm to come up with your innovation idea. The theory of brainstorming is that you turn off your analytical left brain, turn on your intuitive right brain, and creative ideas pop out. But neuroscience now tells us that there is no right or left side of the brain when it comes to thinking. Creative ideas actually happen in the mind, as the whole brain takes in past elements, then selects and combines them — and that’s how creative strategy works.

Within creativity circles, brainstorming is a specific process devised by Alex Osborn, an advertising expert, in the 1940s. He later wrote about brainstorming in several books on creativity that he wrote. He also teamed up with Sidney Parnes to develop a most sophisticated creativity approach known as creative problem solving (CPS), which has been institutionalised and utilised right up to this day

Considering  that creativity is all about trying out new ideas and embracing change, it is somewhat surprising that brainstorming has remained largely unchanged since Mr. Osborn invented it based on a series of assumptions that he made while running his ad agency! This is even more surprising when you consider that these assumptions have largely been proven wrong over the years. Nevertheless, a large number of creativity  and innovation “experts” cling to brainstorming as an unchangeable technique that must be followed simply because it has been been around for so many years.

Sharing ideas in groups isn’t the problem, it’s the “out-loud” part that, ironically, leads to groupthink, rather than the unique ideas you were looking for.   Initial ideas shared in any brainstorming session establish the norms of the session, giving guidance to others on what are appropriate, potential solutions.  Sub-consciously as you are listening at the outset to someone else’s ideas – you are actually assimilating those ideas and slowly letting go of your own – this is a process called “anchoring”.

Because brainstorming favours the initial ideas, conformity pressure leads it to often develop the least creative ideas, people whom have not developed their own idea’s our those hoping to look smart and productive will put forward the standard ideas or the low-hanging fruit first.  Subsequently, the initial idea gains traction and momentum, as the momentum gains, others offer support to the idea – regardless of it’s merits and creativity, both internally and externally.  And so the energy and creativity is spent, leaving the potential creative ideas unspoken and undeveloped.  Extroverts whom seek to ensure that their ideas will be taken seriously constantly lead the sessions, ensuring their ideas are the primary ideas discussed, and even if their initial idea doesn’t gain traction, they tend to constantly refer back to their idea – but with the amendments which are gaining traction during the session – this allows them to portray the idea that the outcome was based on their initial idea!

At Conduit Consulting, in our Company Turnaround and Proccess Auditing activities, as standard we work through potential solutions that key stakeholders in their own organisations have.  After observing that 60-75% of the ideas and conversation was delivered by a minority of individual we began to question the whole brainstorming process as a creative idea gathering utility.  We identified two areas that weakened Brainstorming as a creative idea tool.

1:  Criticism is not allowed:  A fundamental rule of brainstorming is that there should be no criticism of ideas, however this inevitably also prevents challenge.  The idea behind this is that criticising (or even challenging) ideas will hurt people’s feelings and inhibit them, causing them to clam up and prevent them from sharing creative ideas.  As in all areas of business constructive challenge (and yes, even constructive criticism) enhances the level of creativity and the value of the session.  We do not operate a business in a bubble of “no challenge or criticism” if we did, our operations would fail – these behaviours are completely the norm and to banish them from brainstorming makes the session artificial.   This assumption sounds really good, but it is intrinsically flawed.

Some researchers at University of California, Berkeley set up some brainstorming teams in three sets. One set was given no instructions. The second set was given traditional brainstorming instructions and specifically told not to criticise ideas during idea generation. The third set was given brainstorming instructions with difference. This set was specifically encouraged to criticise ideas during the idea generation phase. Most of the teams in the set given traditional brainstorming instructions moderately outperformed the teams in the set given no instructions. But the teams specifically told to criticise ideas came up with the best results by far.

2:  Most People Do Not Like Creative Ideas:  Remember, the aim of brainstorming is to produce a large number of ideas – not necessarily to work the ideas through.  So ideas are decided upon or presented to the managers or leaders to decide upon.  However, given a choice of ideas to implement, most people will select relatively conventional ideas over more creative ideas or will revert to their own interpretation or preference of the solutions. This is doubly true if the evaluation criteria are vague (such as “choose the best idea”).   What we experienced at IMentor when we used Brainstorming was that people were substituting creativity with merely  generating “buzzword ideas” — these are ideas that incorporate the buzzwords, or popular jargon being used in the organisation in question. Moreover, these buzzword ideas are often chosen as the best ideas. In fact we quickly realised that the more dominant, astute managers realise this and use brainstorms as tools to legitimise going forward with a particular (quite often their own) conventional idea, rather than as a means of coming up with new ideas.

So at Conduit Consulting we developed our own system to facilitate create thinking – however we didn’t reinvent the wheel – and we still utilise “Brainstorming” in a fashion – Look out for more details in our next blog post!

anxiety, blocking, brainstorming, innovate, innovation, introverts, outdated, regression, social Posted in: Leadership, Productivity