practice of brainstorming has become so entrenched within organizational behaviour that it is often the unquestioned default protocol for the origina-tion of new ideas and strategy. Such sessions, alongside the convenorigina-tion of the board or team strategy day, often compartmentalize creativity, boxing the formation of ideas and strategy into a small window of time. And yet, as Diehl and Stroebe wrote in 1991:2
Brainstorming groups produce more ideas than an individual but fewer and poorer quality ideas than from individuals working separately. In other words, brainstorms dilute the sum of individual efforts.
One of the original rules for brainstorming, first popularized in the 1950s by Alex Faickney Osborn in the book Applied Imagination,3 focuses on qual-ity through quantqual-ity. It works on the assumption that the more ideas that are generated, the more likely a radical and effective solution will be found.
Yet as Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has pointed out4 multiple studies conducted over a number of decades have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.
Far better then, to establish a way to continually harvest the best ideas from your people. The creative process at Pixar is empowered by a collabora-tive culture that combines tight team working with an ‘ideas from anywhere’
approach. Ed Catmull, President of Pixar, talks about how (since the crea-tive process behind their films involves thousands of ideas) the notion of an idea as a singular thing is a fundamental flaw and instead what is required is a group behaving creatively. So at Pixar, teams of talented people with diverse backgrounds are marshalled around a singular vision.
In outlining his vision for how to build a sustainable creative organiza-tion,5 Catmull gives the example of the head of a major Hollywood studio who told him that his central problem was not finding good people, but instead finding good ideas. This, he says, is a misguided view of creativ-ity that views it as a mysterious solo act and reduces products to a single idea, exaggerating the importance of that initial idea in creating something original. In reality, any kind of complex product development involves continuous creativity from a large number of diverse people and disciplines working effectively together to solve many problems.
In his book on the history of innovation (Where Good Ideas Come From),6 Steven Johnson talks about how ideas, rather than originating from lone creative geniuses that have a sudden spark of inspiration, can mature over time, sometimes laying dormant in the form of ‘partial hunches’ or half-ideas for years. Since it is the collision of these half-ideas that enables
breakthroughs to happen, increasing connectivity is the great driver of inno-vation. Creating physical and virtual spaces where ideas can mingle is an effective way that companies can capitalize on this.
As an example, Steve Jobs reportedly designed the Pixar building deliber-ately to enable different people to run into each other, believing that the best meetings are accidental ones (so much so that, as Isaacson wrote about in his biography of Jobs,7 he positioned the only toilets in the building adjacent to its large atrium to facilitate people running into each other). Informal, random interactions between employees are undervalued.
Another of Osborn’s rules for brainstorming focused on the importance of withholding criticism, in the belief that participants will feel more free to express unusual ideas. A study from Charlan Nemeth,8 a psychologist from UC Berkeley, split 265 students into teams of five and gave them 20 minutes to work on the same problem – how to reduce traffic congestion in the San Francisco bay area. Each team was randomly assigned to work to one of three different conditions: one that specified no further rules at all; one that worked to standard brainstorming rules and emphasized limiting criticism;
and a debate condition in which teams were encouraged to criticize and debate each other’s ideas. The results for which teams did best were not even close. While the groups that brainstormed slightly outperformed those that were given no instructions, the people in the debate condition generated almost 25 per cent more ideas. When participants were asked later if they had had any more ideas that had been triggered by the earlier conversation, those who had been in this latter group produced an average of seven addi-tional ideas, compared to an average of two from participants in the other two groups.
So it seems that the ‘do not criticize’ instruction is highly counterpro-ductive. Every morning at Pixar begins the same way, with the animators debating the previous day’s work (‘ruthlessly shredding each frame’ as Ed Catmull describes it) in sessions designed to critique, debate and improve.
As well as encouraging the team to fully engage with the work of others, the sessions distribute responsibility for catching mistakes across the entire group, a lesson that Ed Catmull learned from the lean manufacturing process.
Brainstorming is so inherent to traditional business practice that the research illustrating its deficiencies seems counterintuitive. Yet truly agile businesses look far beyond traditional approaches to ideas generation and begin to facilitate more debate, builds and criticism, and embed crea-tive approaches and ideas from anywhere in the fabric of how they work every day.