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Thinking ahead: the importance of creative brainstorming
‘BRAINSTORMING’, ‘blue-sky thinking’, ‘thought shower’… these are just some of the names used to describe the act of generating ideas in a group setting. But, as anyone who has tried this method might tell you, what sounds good in theory might not always deliver in reality. Indeed, a ‘thought shower’ can quickly turn into an out-of-control flood if the process is not managed properly.
In anticipation of this, the ‘godfather’ of the technique, American advertising whizz Alex Osborn (who coined the term ‘brainstorming’ in his 1942 book ‘How to Think Up’), initially identified a trinity of basic rules to help keep a creative brainstorming session on track. These were: encourage participants to throw out as many ideas as possible (even if they do sound off-the-wall), build on those ideas and don’t initially criticise any of the suggestions.
For many businesses – especially those facing financial constraints – there’s an obvious attraction to developing ideas in this way. Gathering a group of your (already-paid) employees in a room for a brainstorming session is a relatively low- cost exercise.
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However, in the intervening decades since Osborn’s ‘eureka!’ moment, several studies have found that using Osborn’s rules of brainstorming actually leads to fewer ideas, and fewer good ideas, than the individuals would have developed alone. Why? A primary reason for this ‘productivity loss’, as academics call it, seems to be that when people work together, their ideas tend to converge. And when one person dismisses an idea, it affects the collective memory in the group. This means that they think more similarly about the problem than they did before. In contrast, when people work alone, they’re not influenced by others and naturally diverge in their thinking, because everyone takes a slightly different path to thinking about the problem.
But before you file the technique straight under ‘waste of time’, new methods and approaches around brainstorming have evolved over the intervening decades which have yielded promising results. Most interestingly, while conventional wisdom holds that brainstorming works best when people with the same knowledge set come together to produce new ideas, research from the Mack Institute for Innovation
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By RACHEL ROBERTS
Management argues that it’s not actually the case.
The American company, which brings together the movers and shakers of the corporate world to develop practical tools for the pressing challenges faced by today’s businesses, found that diversity
The research also found that brainstorming sessions conducted this way also delivered results which then produced high economic returns. Which, of course, is music to the ears of any company’s top brass.
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