Managers Must Be Insane To Brainstorm In Groups
“Evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups.” That’s a shocking statement. Adrian Furnham, a professor of organizational and applied psychology at University College London, said it. It turns out it’s completely true.
Participants in interactive brainstorming groups rated their performance quite favorably…[and] felt that interactive group brainstorming was more productive than individual brainstorming…However, actual performance data [showed] …interactive groups generated fewer distinct ideas.
Social Influence processes in group brainstorming
We feel better and more productive in group brainstorming sessions, but in reality, we produce fewer ideas and of fewer quality. In addition to the paper above, these results have been confirmed many times.
The researchers and authors of the paper proposed the theory that three forces impinge group brainstorming productivity:
- Production blocking: in a group, each idea must be processed serially, one-by-one. When brainstorming alone, people process in parallel. This enables much faster iteration.
- Evaluation apprehension: the fear of public speaking or the fear of saying something unintelligent before one’s peers
- Free riding: with many people in the room, the tragedy of the commons set in and some attendees disengage.
If group brainstorming is a key part of your workflow and you’d like to maintain it, research has proven two remedies. First, online brainstorming works well. It enables participants to process in parallel and mitigates some of the free riding effects since contributions are recorded and easily compared among group members.
Second, competition between brainstorming groups also mitigates some negative effects. The group brainstorming sessions who were told the performance figures of a previous group aimed and succeeded in generating as many high quality ideas as their predecessors.
But the simplest and most effective way to generate ideas remains working individually and then convening a team to sift through ideas.
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7 年https://paypal.me/pools/c/80IpRCDmhe
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7 年Interesting article and comments. I just want to add that in some cases workshops are used as a tool on a journey towards creating shared mental models, and not mainly for generating novels ideas.
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7 年There are 3 broad categories for meetings when brainstorming may commonly be considered. (1) When creativity is needed to come up with alternative solutions to the same problem and pick one to go forward with. This could be choosing a new name, logo, design, or coming up with detailed specs for a new product. Here brainstorming often works. (2) When choosing between different alternatives, say to launch a new range of products. Brainstorming usually fails for the reasons very well explained in the article. (3) When brainstorming for a solution to a specific problem. Here brainstorming generally fails, because the group involved often (and unavoidably) includes non-technical, yet senior, employees who insist to be involved and try to push their point of view just because they think they should be seen to do so. For this category, only the best and most technically qualified should be involved to collectively structure a solution whilst hearing each other's views out each other.
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7 年Marijke Vergoossen-van Gils
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