Today the Wall Street Journal published a story titled, “Cancel That Brainstorm. There’s a Better Way to Spur Good Ideas.” The article hated on group brainstorming as being unproductive and proposed individual ideation as the alternative.
Not that individual ideation is bad, but the article’s main premise was flawed. Here is the response that I posted.
“Group brainstorming IS a waste of time BUT ONLY IF you don't know how to do it effectively.
If you focus a group on creating ideas for the specific challenges holding back value to a product, service, or process, you avoid that "this is just random guessing" result. You get relevant ideas if you ask relevant questions. "OK, everybody, give me ideas about anything" is not a relevant question. Of course that sort of "brainstorming" will fail!
If you ask a group to write their ideas for a challenge individually in silence (look up nominal group process) and then briefly explain them without interference from others, you avoid the "only the confident extroverts or Dunning-Krugerites participate" result. If you ask people to publicly say ideas in a crowd setting with a gatekeeper writing their ideas on a whiteboard, you will inhibit many people from participating. Worse, the gatekeeper will (maybe unintentionally) skew ideas to their own thinking as they write them.
If you ask participants to focus on creating tangible ideas for building a solution rather than vague generalities, you avoid the "These ideas just tell us what we already knew" result. You get ideas about HOW to address the challenge.
Put all that together, and group brainstorming will be enormously effective. It works. I did exactly that for years as an innovation consultant.”
If your group brainstorming fails, just know that abandoning group brainstorming isn’t the only answer. In fact, having more brains collaborate on solutions is generally very valuable. When I hear lots of other ideas, they spark new ideas and connections for me! The problem may not be the group dynamic - your group brainstorming process may need some rework.
I wrote about this in Innovation #2 - Brainstorming Isn’t Just Guessing a long time ago.
For those who want a deeper dive, I outline an effective process in depth (based on my years of hands-on experience) in “Be Your Product Develop Coach”, an Ebook I sell.
If your company wants a hand designing its own innovation process - and is within a few hours of Fort Wayne, Indiana - I am available to visit and walk you through getting started. Contact me here.
Let’s clear up this misunderstanding once and for all!