The Persistence of Brainstorming

We all know what it looks like: groups of people gathered around tables, shouting out ideas while a designated scribe frantically lists them, on a piece of paper, a whiteboard, a wall chart. Frequently, candy or other small motivators litter the tables. Depending on the participants and the facilitator, it can be engaging, even exhilarating, or it can be a dull exercise whose only products are a list of shopworn ideas and a general sense of discouragement. This is brainstorming, and we've all done it, as participants and as leaders. It's become ubiquitous as a way of accessing creativity in groups, and it's a key element in the innovation toolbox, one R&D groups turn to again and again in the search for creative solutions and radical new ideas. But does it work? Brainstorming is 60 years old this year. Ad man and creativity theorist Alex Osborn proposed the term in Applied Imagination, first published in 1953 and updated regularly until his death in 1966. Osborn's original concept, introduced in his 1942 book How to Think Up, was simple: gather 10 or 12 people in a room, a mix of experts and novices, and give them one question to answer. Osborn said that what he called the "ideative efficacy" of the session depended on its adherence to two core principles: suspend judgment, and go for quantity of ideas, not quality. The intention is to access the group's collective creativity by taking down the barriers that stop people from suggesting ideas. The pure simplicity of the method is undoubtedly part of its appeal. And it has, for decades, had the imprimatur of neuroscience. As author and Columbia Business School professor William Duggan describes it in a recent interview, "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, as Duggan has pointed out in his books Strategic Intuition and Creative Strategy, neuroscientists have now abandoned that model of the brain. Creativity, science now believes, happens across the entire brain, in a complex process of selecting, combining, and recombining elements of experience, knowledge, and context. Brainstorming, says Duggan, simply doesn't allow enough time or space for that process to develop, and it doesn't allow for the power of individual creativity. Duggan is not the only one to question to the usefulness of brainstorming. Deborah Kaye makes some similar points in her book, Red Thread Thinking. She suggests that "the best new ideas don't emerge from formal brainstorming" for a variety of reasons and summarizes some of the biggest barriers in a February 2013 Fast Company article. "First, the brain doesn't make connections in a rigid atmosphere," she says. "There is too much pressure and too much influence from others in the group. " In a 2012 article, Dave Ibsen outlines recent research that debunks some of brainstorming's most treasured principles: those psychological papers have questioned whether groups are really more creative than individuals and shown that criticism doesn't stifle creativity, but rather powers it. Jena McGregor highlights a 2011 study that shows that "cognitive fixation," a process by which people become focused on the ideas they've already heard, may reduce the productivity of brainstorming. Creativity consultant Jeffrey Baumgartner agrees. Baumgartner is clearly committed to promoting his own creativity system, but his September 2013 blog post offers a good summary of the arguments against brainstorming. Brainstorming isn't dead, though, not by a wide margin. It continues to be used by innovative firms from Apple to IDEO. (See Helen Walters's brief 2008 piece on an SXSW presentation by Michael Lopp, one of Apple's senior engineering managers, for more on brainstorming in Apple's innovation process. Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman describe the role of brainstorming in IDEO's process in their 2001 book The Art of Innovation, and Kelley describes IDEO's rules for Fast Company's Linda Tischler. …