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Thinking ahead: the importance of creative brainstorming
American advertising whizz Alex Osborn coined the term ‘brainstorming’ in his 1942 book ‘How to Think Up’. Since then, it’s been a ‘go-to’ method for companies looking to develop ideas for future direction. Could it work for your business and are there pitfalls to avoid?
‘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, Alex Osborn, 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.
brainstorming session will generate some pretty impressive creative ideas for your company’s future. Even better, these ideas will be more ‘owned’ by the team and meet less resistance when it comes to putting them into action.
Fingers- crossed, the
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.
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 is simply not enough. The essential ingredient is in-depth expertise of the topic on the table. That is to say that an ‘outsider’, fully versed in the area you’re working in, could be the catalyst needed to spark the truly innovative creative ideas you’re looking for. They bring a fresh approach that will shake up old patterns of thinking within your business.
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.
The 635 Method, developed by German marketing professional Bernd Rohrbach in the late 1960s, tackles the ‘productivity
By RACHEL ROBERTS
And they’ve 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 Management argues that it’s not actually the case.
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