Brainstorming is For Losers
I've always hated "brainstorming" -- both the teeth-rattling stupidity of the word and the act itself, which has always seemed to me to a kind of free-form goofing off. Sure, there's a lot of collaboration in my work as a writer, but there's also a lot of useless time-wasting in groups and meetings. In other words, sometimes many brains are worth less than one. From a piece by Susan Cain in the NYTimes:
SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
And this just seems spot on to me:
...brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. “The quantitative results of group brainstorming are beyond question,” Mr. Osborn wrote. “One group produced 45 suggestions for a home-appliance promotion, 56 ideas for a money-raising campaign, 124 ideas on how to sell more blankets.”
But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”
Which makes this alarming:
Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning. Even subjects like math and creative writing are often taught as committee projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question.
Underpinning all of this collectivist, brainstorming groupwork, is, I think, something nasty and totalitarian. All thoughts must be produced -- and vetted -- by the hive. Squirreling away in silence and solitude is condemned for being "anti-social" or, worse, ego-driven. When you're alone you have interesting and (maybe) revolutionary thoughts. When you're in a group, you naturally tend to fit your thinking into the prevailing pattern.
No wonder our public schools love this kind of group thinking so much.
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Oct '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
George Savage
I don't like group showers either! [joke alert]
Work teams are different because, for successful ones at least, there is clear assignment of individual responsibility and accountability for different aspects of the project. I've yet to encounter a school project organized along these lines. · Jan 17 at 11:56am
Oh and I forgot to mention, I have had classes in college where professors did try to organize more along those lines. Whether they were successful or not I don't know--I'd have to see the final grades--but at least some people are trying to improve the structure.
May '11
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
Brainstorming is more often than not futile. Collaboration often produces tremendous results. If one has a solid idea and is willing to be open to imput from others it gives one a fresh perspective. The key is to be the one who has the final say.
Aug '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
I had one one genuine "group project" in university, and that's how we organized it. We simply split the subject matter into four segments and let each person do his/her own thing. The only "group" part of the project was when we presented our individual parts to the class. (The subject was the cultural significance of Rocky Horror Picture Show, incidentally. My part of the presentation was the political context of the late 1970s.)
There were also my students films and student videos, which could sort of be considered "group projects" since it was pretty much impossible to do one all by oneself. Those sorts of projects require actors and crew. However, only the director of the film/video got the grade, so they don't really count. Anybody else working on the production had other incentives (experience, camera hoggery, a quid pro quo promise from the director to help on their film later on, cash in rare cases, etc...).
Every volunteer I had did it simply because they thought it would be cool to be an a "real" movie.
Anyhoo, back to my point, I graduated in 1997. Is it unusual that I was mostly spared from these dreaded "group projects"?
Edited on January 17, 2012 at 9:23pmJun '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
Amen, George. And I'm as guilty as anyone (Internet and I-Phone, but not TV). A corollary to boredom is solitude. We're creating a society in which people cannot bear to spend time alone. Perhaps it's the way I was brought up or the era in which I was raised (I'm almost cootish), but I love solitude. I love my family and spending time with them is great, but a day by myself is like heaven. It's on those days I do my best thinking: I'll bet I get all the way up to a 100 IQ on those days.
Aug '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
Brainstorming sessions are perfectly valid ways of collecting ideas and coming to some kind of consensus.
Sure, it's great if you have genius loners who can come up with great ideas, but genius inspiration is not very reliable. Not only that, but real geniuses are rare. In the real world of deadlines and large teams, you simply can't build products by relying on your one or two wizards to show up with a brilliant plan to save the day.
In addition, the concept of 'buy-in' is not just marketing speak or a new-age buzzword. If you don't get buy in from the team, you'll find that people who don't like the genius's big idea will subtly work to subvert it. They'll complain about its flaws to other team members, they'll drag their feet when asked to work on it, etc. You want your teams to feel like they all have ownership of the ideas, so that they actually function as a team.
In brainstorming sessions there are no bad ideas - that rule is in place to prevent an intimidating atmosphere which causes lateral thinking to stop.
Aug '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
Rob: Think of brainstorming like improv comedy. A good improv comedy troupe will feed off each other's talents and good ideas and build on them. There is individual contribution, but the end output depends on everyone playing along, and in the best cases, the end result is funnier than the contributions of any individual.
And if you've ever done an improv workshop, you know that one of the key rules is, "no blocking'. This is the equivalent of 'no bad ideas'. Creativity comes from lateral thinking. People think laterally when they are happy, comfortable, and in an atmosphere where ideas are not shot down or made to look stupid. People have to know that they can say *anything and not be mocked or criticized for it. And sometimes even the dumbest ideas contain a spark of a better idea, or trigger a better idea in someone else. In the best brainstorming sessions, people enjoy coming up with wild ideas, and great stuff often emerges.
Brainstorming is also used not to replace individual genius, but to shake out things that might be missed by one individual with imperfect knowledge. Safety and failure mode analysis often benefits from brainstorming.
Aug '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
One last thing about brainstorming: It's a verbal and visual activity. As a result, it engages different pathways in the brain, and often leads people to ideas or solutions they can't think of when pondering silently in their offices.
Anyone who has done problem-solving, programming, engineering, or creative work has had the experience of hitting a roadblock, being unable to get past it, and seeking out the help of a co-worker - only to find that the process of describing the problem verbally causes the solution to pop into your head without the co-worker saying a thing. Brainstorming sessions activate many parts of the brain, and if they are carried out intelligently, they allow individuals to rise to the height of their own creativity.
I've been in brainstorming sessions where everyone starts firing on all cylinders, people are laughing and throwing out wild ideas, and in the end we have a design or a concept that's better than any individual would have come up with. I've also been in brainstorming sessions where people mock stupid ideas or complain about the process, or a manager sits glowering at everyone, and thinking simply shuts down.
Aug '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
I always hated that rule, because sometimes great humour can be found from a well-timed, "no."
Edited on January 17, 2012 at 10:28pmRe: Brainstorming is For Losers
Trace Urdan
My highly competitive Type-A kid is enormously frustrated by the process and thus, in my estimation as a parent, enormously benefitted. Avoiding being dragged down by the lazy ones is a highly useful and marketable skill. And the teacher knows perfectly well where the contributions come from and grade accordingly. · Jan 17 at 9:49am
How is this a benefit? If the teacher "knows" who's slacking, what's the point of the exercise? It just seems to create cynicism on the part of the students -- that it's really just a matter of manipulating the perception, and not about doing the work. It may work for your son, but it seems to me that it encourages laziness and groupthink in everyone, including the teachers. And the research is pretty clear that it inhibits creativity.
May '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
George Savage: School group projects are micro-scale examples of collectivism at work. In practice, if you are lucky there is one high-achiever who for personal reasons shoulders the load and carries the slackers to an undeserved A. Only rarely does the group coalesce and function as intended. And if the aim is polishing a basic skill--perhaps writing a research paper--the silent partners are the real losers: you don't learn much about writing from watching. · Jan 17 at 11:43am
Edited on Jan 17 at 11:43 am
No one said the project had to be poorly designed or ill-suited to group work; nor that it was to be the only method of instruction; nor that the teachers supervising the work had to be morons.
Collectivist? Please. The air inside the Ricochet bubble is growing thin indeed.
Mar '11
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
I had one co-worker in particular that I did this to all the time. I'd call her over, get halfway through the description, then say "oh" and tell her "I've got it."
She threatened to have a cardboard cutout of herself made so she could leave it propped up next to my desk.
We did make fun of ideas though, but it wasn't malicious or anything. Occassionally this led us to something that would work, or reveal a way to get around the problem.
Mar '11
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
The Double-Post Fairy Strikes Again!
Edited on January 17, 2012 at 11:28pmAug '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
I think it's an imp. Maybe a brownie?
Nov '10
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
I often do think of those two as being along the same lines, which is why I like to look to the loners as inspiration for real creativity. I always thought of this as one of the best images of real creativity in action:
Aug '11
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
I think Group Brainstorming can be done effectively, and would go along with the "improv" description. My approach to brainstorming is to let every idea, no matter how crazy, into the arena, and then afterwards begin feeding them to the lions, one by one. Starting with the craziest.
Done well, it can provoke some great out-of-the-box thinking. Done poorly, it is an enormous waste of time. But much depends on the group.
I think "collaboration" and "group project" are slightly different animals. In the former, each applies his own strengths to an aspect of a project, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. My experience with the latter is that individual strengths are subsumed by the will of the group, and the end result is watered down to a thin mediocrity.
Dec '11
Re: Brainstorming is For Losers
Speaking as a business owner, I'd confirm that this is a statement of fact!
Spot on post.