radiant.matrix

An interesting quote from Frans Johansson’s book The Medici Effect came to my attention. Here’s the interesting bit, to me:

the researchers found that virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups.

I don’t know exactly why this is, but I suspect it has something to do with the same mechanisms that lead to groupthink. If someone has a particular idea, and you have one counter to it, you’re less likely to bring up your idea. Yes, most brainstorming sessions begin with rules and reminders that are supposed to prevent that behavior, but those rules and reminders operate at the conscious level. The tendency not to bring up something that countermands a colleague is far too ingrained to be changed by the presence of a simple rule.

So, what should we do? I have a couple of ideas.

First, let’s get the disclaimer out of the way: I’m no psychologist. The only qualifications I have to comment on any of this are my experience in observing and participating in meetings, and my hobbyist’s study of behavior.

In order to develop an idea of what we should do, it’s important to revisit our base assumptions; namely, what is it we want from the exercise of brainstorming? The mindtools website has a pretty decent summary of brainstorming:

[Brainstorming] is particularly helpful when you need to break out of stale, established patterns of thinking, so that you can develop new ways of looking at things…

Used with your team, it helps you bring the experience of all team members into play during problem solving.

This increases the richness of solutions explored (meaning that you can find better solutions to the problems you face, and make better decisions.) It can also help you get buy in from team members for the solution chosen - after all, they have helped create that solution.

So, to summarize, we brainstorm because we want to tap into the breadth of our team’s experience; find effective, creative solutions; and promote collaboration, and thus buy-in, within the team.

Tapping into the breadth of experience seems to be where traditional “brainstorming meetings” fall down. It seems as though people are far less willing to share what their experience brings when they’re in the same room as others. Rather, it appears best to allow team members to come up with many ideas on their own, then collect these, eliminate duplicates, and share the list. This has the added advantage of removing ownership from a particular idea — only the person who contributed the idea will recognize it as theirs.

However, this distributed approach makes it a little harder to promote collaboration. As with most things, the key is in the follow-up. Once the list of ideas is generated and shared with the team, let it percolate a bit — allow your team members to think about the ideas a bit, but not discuss them just yet. Once that rest period is complete, we can begin to whittle down the list. For this, a real-time meeting is essential.

Go through each idea, with the goal of figuring out if it will or will not work. This requires a degree of control: it’s important not to get into how well an idea will work, just whether it would actually solve the problem at hand, no matter how clumsily. Once the “dead weight” is off the list, try to eliminate the least-desirable 2/3 of the solutions. This is a long process, done by consensus, and is probably the most difficult aspect of this process.

The remaining ideas can go through the usual process of analysis and selection.

If you try this in your workplace, please share your experience! I’d be curious about what does and does not work.