Why Claims “Brainstorming Doesn’t Work” Are So Silly

Yesterday, I got an email from an executive who asserted that, as an academic devoted to evidence-based management, I should not be teaching group brainstorming to students or executives because research shows “it doesn't work.” A lot of people make this claim. See this 2012 New Yorker article. Alas, this assertion is an overstatement at the very least and possibly downright wrong. My close reading of the research in question, my own academic research, and a good 20 years of observations in organizations where creativity is way of life suggest that the experiments alleged to support this damning conclusion provide far less useful information than is often claimed. I contend that group brainstorming can and does fuel creativity at times-- notably because it has certain benefits for creative people and organizations that are often not discussed, studied, or well understood by the naysayers.

People who follow my work will know that I write about this topic every few years. I will stop writing about it when people who produce and advertise the evidence in question crawl out of their narrow little academic hiding places, stop treating brainstorming as a standalone method that can be divorced from the broader creative process, and start studying people and teams that routinely do real creative work in real organizations.

My former doctoral student Andy Hargadon and I once devoted way too much time (a good three years) to the question of whether academic research shows that brainstorming is useless (or not). In the name of full-disclosure, please note I was a Fellow at IDEO for nearly 20 years and am a co-founder of the Stanford d.school, both organizations that include brainstorming in their creativity tool kits. But I am not at all a religious zealot about the method. I see it as just one sometimes useful tool. And I have often said that the d.school should spend less time teaching brainstorming and more time teaching people how to fight in constructive ways – something that I agree with some critics of brainstorming about. And if you want evidence that the d.school uses more than just brainstorming to spark creativity, look at the huge range of techniques in Bootcamp Bootleg, which you can download for free.

Here are some of the main lessons we learned about most group brainstorming experiments and why they don't provide much useful information about the pros and cons of the technique. This piece draws on posts I have done elsewhere over the years (see here and here, for example), as well my research with Hargadon:

1.Brainstorming performance in most comparative studies is defined solely as the efficiency of individual idea generation -- the number of ideas generated per person in say a 15 minute session. A typical brainstorming experiment compares the speed at which people generate ideas such as "what can you do with a brick" when sitting alone and talking into microphone versus doing so in face-to-face groups assigned to the same task. These studies rarely measure idea quality, commitment to the ideas, whether people learned things from listening to others ideas, subsequent success of projects that use the ideas, the impact on organizational culture, or any other outcomes. Most of these these studies don't measure whether people build on or recombine fellow brainstormers' ideas (one of the alleged advantages of group brainstorms) because doing so is impossible when you are brainstorming alone. And these studies also don’t measure the reactions of clients to group brainstorms: Clients of creative companies are often impressed, and gain creative confidence themselves, from watching, catching, and adding to the collective energy that emerges during a well-ran group brainstorm that is packed with skilled and imaginative people.

These and other additional outcomes matter to companies that produce and sell creative work – and are largely ignored by experiments that show “productivity loss” occurs when group brainstorming is compared to individual brainstorming. Yes, the main finding is true, if trivial: Individuals can and do speak more ideas per unit of time into a microphone when they are working alone because they don't have to wait their turn to talk (and do that awful listening thing!). But conclusions based on this single and suspect metric that “brainstorming doesn’t work” are pretty silly. Brainstorming is linked to many outcomes that experimental psychologists just can't measure during the 15 minutes or so that the average experiment takes (or with the groups of strangers they study who have never met before and likely never will again).

2. If creativity is about both talking and listening, if you look at the data from these same studies that purport to debunk brainstorming, Hargadon and I figured out that people are exposed to substantially more novel ideas per unit of time when you compare group to solo brainstorming. I contend that talking and listening are both key elements of the social process underlying creativity.

3. Nearly all experimental brainstorming studies are done with people who have no training or experience in doing or leading brainstorming. The conclusion that brainstorming doesn't work is based largely on studies that use unsupervised brainstorming virgins. As I wrote on my personal blog way back in 2006 "To put it another way, if these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex." The few exceptions to this pattern are revealing. According to a study in Small Group Research, when group brainstorms are facilitated properly, the so-called “individual productivity loss” seems to disappear. And, in another study in that journal, when individual brainstormers were trained in idea generation methods, the usual “individual productivity loss” dropped significantly.

The upshot of our research and my continuing reading of brainstorming experiments is that, if you are just looking at the speed at which an individual can spew out ideas, individual brainstorming is likely superior – because turn-taking and listening slows how quickly people can say ideas or write them on Post-it notes. But if you look at the range of positive effects brainstorming has at a place like IDEO -- spreading ideas around the company, teaching newcomers and reminding veterans of solutions and technologies and who knows what, providing variety and intrinsically satisfying breaks for designers working on other projects, creating what I called a functional status contests where designers compete politely to show off their creativity (a key job skill), and impressing clients, then brainstorming may have numerous other positive benefits in real organizations where creative work is done -- none of which have not been considered seriously in those simple experiments. If so, those findings about the pure efficiency of solo creativity may well be beside the point when it comes to evaluating the contributions of group brainstorming in organizations where people use the method routinely.

That is why I believe that assertions that brainstorming "doesn't work" are too sweeping. Such conclusions have not been studied adequately in real organizations, or even with with people who have developed brainstorming skills. I wish that all those naive and narrow-minded stop blasting out this naïve, narrow-minded, and – at the very least – premature conclusion. But I doubt that this one post will stop such claims.

P.S. for true nerds, here is the academic article on brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I wrote: Download ASQ Storming

I am a Stanford Professor who studies and writes about leadership, organizational change, and navigating organizational life. Follow me on Twitter@work_matters, and visit my website and posts on LinkedIn. My latest book is The Asshole Survival Guide: How To Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt. Before that, I published Scaling Up Excellence with Huggy Rao. My main focus these days is on working with Huggy Rao to develop strategies and tools that help leaders and teams change their organizations for the better--with a particular focus on organizational friction. Check out the two seasons of my "Friction Podcast" at Stanford ecorner or itunes.

Photo by Patrick Beaudouin, used with his permission.