#301: Better Brainstorming Sessions
Leigh Thompson, Wall Street Journal: Do you look for quality, feasibility, and complements? If so, you may be doing it wrong
Leigh Thompson is the J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations and a director of executive-education programs at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She is the author of several books, including “Negotiating the Sweetspot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table.”
Most businesses use brainstorming to generate new ideas. Too many of them, however, don’t do it right.
To illustrate, I conducted an informal in-person survey of more than 50 executives and other managers in one of my team leadership classes last year. First, I asked: “How many of you use brainstorming in your teams?” Every single hand rose. Next I presented the four rules of brainstorming—according to Alex Osborn, the late founder of brainstorming and the “O” in advertising giant BBDO—and asked my students if they followed these. No more than five people raised their hands.
I wasn’t surprised. Somehow, over the years, “brainstorming” has come to simply mean a free-for-all, where anything goes: One manager in my class proudly proclaimed, “Our only rule is no rules!”
But that is exactly where so many groups go wrong—believing that the way to enhance creativity is to just let everybody loose. The genius of Mr. Osborn’s brainstorming rules, by contrast, is to create an environment where thoughtful guidelines about the process liberate people to think more creatively. Indeed, one study found that groups coached to follow Osborn’s rules—advanced in his now decades-old book “Applied Imagination”—produced nearly 70% more good ideas (as judged by independent raters) than groups told to brainstorm without following any rules.
Here, then, is a closer look at Mr. Osborn’s guiding principles:
Rule #1: Invite the outrageous.
Ideas that may sound outrageous or outlandish can yield high-value strategies and solutions because they can liberate others to offer fresh thinking or contain a bit of truth a team can build on. But don’t simply tell your team, “Be outrageous”; instead, be a brainstorming role model by suggesting an off-the-wall idea yourself. Another way to stir up out-of-the-ordinary ideas is to invite an oddball or someone with a distinctly unique skill set to join—say, inviting a wedding-dress designer to be part of the team of scientists and engineers trying to design a better protective suit for healthcare workers.
Rule #2: Don’t evaluate.
Don’t judge, criticize or even compliment ideas. Not surprisingly, this is the rule that is most often broken. We are in the Effusive Praise Era, but when we shower praise on certain members of groups—but not others—it’s pretty obvious that evaluation is going on, which can lead people to self-censor. One way to remove evaluation altogether is to make contributions anonymous. In a brainstorming session I held with a corporate travel company, I immediately instituted two rules: “No guessing and no confessions.” So when ideas showed up on poster boards, no one was allowed to guess whose they were or reveal their own.
Rule #3: Strive for quantity.
Encourage participants to put forth as many ideas as possible within whatever parameters have been established. Research shows that groups told to strive for quantity over quality not only generate more ideas, they ultimately generate more high-quality ideas, as well.
Recently, I ran an informal experiment with a client company. In the first brainstorming sprint, I gave groups six minutes to generate new product ideas. In the second sprint, I told some groups to double their output; other groups weren’t given this specific goal. The results were astounding. Not only did the “double your output” groups come up with more ideas, the quantity goal pushed them to think of extremely unusual ideas and innovative combinations of ideas (more on that below).
Rule #4: Build on and combine different ideas.
Variety is the key to successful brainstorming. The goal is to generate lots of ideas—see the point about quantity above—then look for ways to integrate and synthesize them, so the end product or solution is greater than the sum. The key here is to build on novel ideas suggested in the group, not just “feasible” ones.
No one likes rules, so I believe it’s best to frame Mr. Osborn’s “Big 4” as “suggestions” or “guidelines.” So go ahead and brainstorm—but in the way originally intended.
At the Kole Performance Group, we don’t invent everything we implement. Much like this article today, we bring you ideas that are proven, and relavent. Let’s use Leigh’s suggestion right now! What did you learn in this article? What do you want to implement right away? Why do you think it will be successful?
Please leave a comment and spark a brainstorming dialogue!