Most people equate brainstorming with getting a crowd together and throwing out potential ideas. After a few ideas are tossed around, the loudest person in the room or the one with the highest rank usually forces consensus around his or her original idea.
Brainstorming has been so abused and misused that it’s difficult to think of it as having an original developer. However, the process of brainstorming originally was developed by Alex Osborn in 1957. Osborn was a founding partner at the renowned advertising firm BBDO and author of “Applied Imagination,” one of the first books on creativity in business. Osborn’s book was an attempt to codify the creative process he and his team used at BBDO. It is in “Applied Imagination” that Osborn first coined the term, “brainstorming.” He researched the environment that his advertising teams collaborated in and found that their creativity was most stimulated when certain “rules” were followed:
- Generate as many ideas as possible.
- Defer judgment on all ideas.
- Generate wild ideas.
- Build upon each other’s ideas.
Osborn believed that by following these rules, teams would experience a drastic increase in their creative output compared to their standard practice of getting together to “throw out some ideas.” It turns out he was correct. Research has shown that properly run brainstorming sessions, especially when run by a trained facilitator, produce more and better-quality ideas than freestyle collaboration. Brainstorming works, but it doesn’t work alone.
Even Osborn recognized that gathering people in a room and merely brainstorming was insufficient for producing truly creative ideas. To him, creative ideas and solutions involved spending time considering three things: facts, ideas, and solutions. Osborn believed that creative teams needed to spend sufficient time with each of these components individually. Instead of jumping right to solutions, which many would-be brainstormers do, teams should have ample time to discuss the facts and information surrounding whatever it is that needs to be done.
In addition, when most people brainstorm, they focus too much on ideas as individual entities, not as building blocks for more ideas. “A lot of people view brainstorming in an additive way—we’re adding to the number of ideas,” Keith Sawyer explains. Sawyer is a professor of education at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and is one of the country’s leading scientific experts on creativity. “But that’s not the power of the group. The group’s power comes from the synergy that goes beyond the additive. What the most creative companies do is tell the members of the group to come up with lists of ideas before they come to the brainstorming session. What the group is really powerful for is exchanging ideas and then having ideas bump up against one another and merge in surprising new ways that any one person might not have thought of on their own.” As ideas combine and transform, they add to the total number of ideas generated, but the new ideas are also drastically higher in quality.
Above all, it’s important to remember that as a practice, brainstorming is the most utilized technique in organizations (even if it’s mostly utilized wrongly). However, the creative process is much more complex than simple idea generation. The most innovative organizations don’t rely on just one technique for generating ideas. Sawyer argues, “Brainstorming has to be embedded in a broader, longer-term organizational strategy in which idea generation and creativity are a part of what goes on in the organization.” It’s important to brainstorm properly, but it’s even more important to embed elements of the creative process into everything the organizations does.
Reprinted by permission from the publisher, Jossey-Bass, a Wiley brand, from The Myths of Creativity by David Burkus. Copyright (c) 2013 by David Burkus.
David Burkus is the author of The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas. He is also founder of LDRLB and assistant professor of management at Oral Roberts University.
