
Brainstorming Doesn't Really Work - gruseom
http://newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all
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tlb
The no-criticism rule is probably more important in a hierarchical
organization. At BBDO in the 1940s, I imagine junior creatives were
intimidated by senior partners and the challenge was to get them to speak
freely. The experiments that show no benefit were done on groups of students,
all roughly peers who weren't afraid to utter a silly idea.

The article suggests that brainstorming was invalid all along, but it's more
fair to say that it had a time and place. Society and business have evolved
towards equality and inclusiveness, so the no-criticism rule is less
important.

~~~
Tloewald
I think your point might be valid, but it would be nice to test it. The
obvious place to try it might be Japan which still has a pretty hierarchical
corporate culture.

Perhaps a stronger argument along the same lines is that in a business setting
anything that breaks away from the highly dysfunctional mechanics of many
business meetings (which are not purely due to hierarchy) has to be a Good
Thing.

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Confusion
The linkbait title does not correctly convey the contents. The _actual_
conclusion is: brainstorming works, but only if you critically evaluate the
products of the brainstorm session.

This matches both my experience and what my girlfriend was taught concerning
how to conduct brainstorm sessions, which includes the variation of first
having everyone brainstorm _alone_ , then combining and grouping the outcomes
and then evaluating the outcome.

~~~
freshhawk
> the variation of first having everyone brainstorm alone

This would be called "thinking" by most people wouldn't it?

Calling it a variation rather than the complete opposite approach seems like
people just like the word brainstorming.

Your conclusion is if you decide to call whatever works "brainstorming" then
brainstorming works. If you study the specific technique that has been called
brainstorming for decades it doesn't work. Like the title says.

~~~
Confusion
Your normal mode of thinking involves quickly dismissing many ideas, thoughts,
hypothesis, etc., which is necessary to actually get stuff done. Brainstorming
isn't a good idea when you're trying to think of a way to cross a road
quickly.

Brainstorming let's you freely associate by postponing _your own_ judgement.
It gets you into corners of your mind you wouldn't visit if you were actively
trying to solve the problem. Of course that is also a way of 'thinking': the
point is that you get into a different mindset and think in different ways.

~~~
freshhawk
Fair enough, is it common to describe this task as brainstorming when it's
done solo?

I only really hear it used when it's a done as a group activity.

~~~
Confusion
As far as I know that is common, but I would also still describe it as a group
activity, even though the initial idea generation is done solo. The process
could for instance be:

* Do a short exercise to prime everyone to 'let go of their default mindset' (you can leave this out if everyone is experienced in doing this, although it should usually be fun)

* Have everyone put their own ideas to paper, within a reasonable amount of time, while together in the same room, but without communicating about them

* Together, group the results: determine overlaps and outliers.

* Then discuss the results together

In the last phase, the first exercise and the resulting mindset still has some
effect: people will be less protective of their specific ideas, because of the
mindset that generated them, which can easily be blamed for 'silly' ideas.
Some outliers can therefore be dismissed easily. On the other hand, people
will more seriously consider ideas they might otherwise have dismissed as
'silly' right after they were uttered. Some outliers may prove to be very
valuable and a group brainstorm wouldn't have resulted in them.

Brainstorming, as I understand the term, is used to describe this entire
process of idea generation _and_ evaluation. Not just the phase/mindset when
generating ideas and not just when that happens in a group together. Perhaps
this school of thought is more regionally limited than I know and this is
indeed not generally known as 'brainstorming'.

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hencq
It doesn't come as a surprise to me that the group dynamic of bringing lots of
talented people together in the same building is superior to brainstorming.
However, that seems like a false choice to me. Brainstorming is often used to
solve a problem now; you don't always have time to wait for something genius
to emerge (which might not even be related to your problem). Brainstorming
tries to emulate that situation by having people interact more.

That said, in my experience the quality of a brainstorm session depends a lot
on who are participating and/or who is facilitating. I find brainstorming
works well when the problem space is clearly defined and people with different
functions or backgrounds participate. As the article says on the interaction
between Chomsky and Halle: “We became great friends,” Halle says. “And friends
shouldn’t be shy about telling each other when they are wrong. What am I
supposed to do? Not tell him he’s got a bad idea?” For this to work, people
shouldn't be afraid to tell each other things that can be shot down. For
friends this is natural, but for random people put together in a team it often
isn't.

In a way I think brainstorming is a way to simulate the sort of discussion
that would take place in a group that the article refers to as having a high
Q. This means both feeling free to give your opinion, but also leaving room
for discussion. Maybe brainstorming focuses a little too much on the former,
though in my experience a good facilitator will also stimulate discussion.
Personally I'm planning to look into the 'debating' technique the article
describes as well.

~~~
ken
> Brainstorming is often used to solve a problem now; you don't always have
> time to wait for something genius to emerge (which might not even be related
> to your problem). Brainstorming tries to emulate that situation by having
> people interact more.

That's not what I got out of it at all. In the U.C. Berkeley experiment,
simply giving the same number of people the suggestion to "debate" caused them
to have far more ideas, in the same amount of time. Brainstorming doesn't have
people interact more -- it has people interact in a specific way (no
criticism), even though that has since been shown to actually be harmful to
developing ideas. It's not to save time.

------
Eliezer
Matches my experience. To have one good idea, you must not have one hundred
terrible ideas.

~~~
harshreality
It reminded me of your evaporative cooling essay.
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/)

Perhaps communities that are quick to kick out oddballs/trolls may reduce
noise and distraction. However, by eliminating dissent and criticism, even
invalid dissent, this newyorker article suggests that the community also might
be harming creativity of comments by remaining members. Eventually creativity
becomes so low that the forum members get fed up with the monotony and leave,
and the forum dies?

A hundred terrible ideas would drown out a few good ideas, but a positive
number of horribly wrong or even offensive ideas might be optimal for
generating the most good ideas.

~~~
dhimes
Not to hijack the thread, but your linked article is excellent.

 _This is one reason why it's important to be prejudiced in favor of
tolerating dissent. Wait until substantially after it seems to you justified
in ejecting a member from the group, before actually ejecting. If you get rid
of the old outliers, the group position will shift, and someone else will
become the oddball_.

Wise words indeed.

~~~
jacques_chester
Looks like a reinforcing feedback loop to me.

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gojomo
I would caution against taking results derived from random groupings of
undergraduates, thrown together for the purpose of one classroom/study, and
generalizing those to workplaces.

At workplaces, recruiting, self-selection, market forces, and management have
all changed the group composition and motivations significantly.

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TobiasCassell
Scott Berkun rails against Jonah Lehrer here.

[http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2012/in-defense-of-
brainstor...](http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2012/in-defense-of-
brainstorming-2/)

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drats
I am really beginning to deeply loathe link-bait titles as they are guaranteed
to introduce straw men and unnecessary arguments into the comments.

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alinajaf
Haven't had much experience of brainstorming in a group session, but I find it
immensely useful individually. Any time I'm stuck for ideas for blog posts,
web-based projects, libraries etc, I timebox 20 minutes and spit as many ideas
out into a buffer as I can manage. Most of the time I get junk but
occasionally I discover ones worth testing.

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jim_kaiser
The whole confusion seems to be a lack of information in the arguments as to
what exactly they are brainstorming about. Is it a new movie/book idea or
solving a programming problem, creating a software architecture, planning an
invasion or just discussing how to improve a process etc... All of these are
different situations and in some cases, brainstorming might work better,
others are best left to individuals. You could try and guess which is good for
which as a practice and you will still probably have some subjective cases
where one might be better than the other. So, lets not make generalized
statements please.

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ekianjo
Usually every brainstorming session ends up, at least in my experience, with a
"vote" on the ideas generated. The vote is not substantiated by anything. No
need to justify.

I fail to understand how voting for stuff (which is basically the dictatorship
of the mainstream opinion) is going to get the most creative solutions on the
table. That defeats the whole purpose, and makes brainstorming fail to deliver
on its promises.

~~~
Confusion
I have never experienced voting on the outcomes of a brainstorm session and
that makes no sense at all to me. It's about generating ideas and it will,
hopefully, include ideas that sound nice initially, but are bad when given
some more thought. There should be a round to separate the wheat from the
chaff.

~~~
ekianjo
In my experience (again), we do have two rounds to separate them. But both of
them are voting-based rounds. One vote to narrow down the 30+ ideas to like 5
or so, and a second one to reduce it to one or two :) The outcome was very
minimal compared to the overall time wasted on the process (5-6 people in a
room, for one hour, ending up with a not-so-interesting idea... there are
better ways to spend a team's time).

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bane
I've used group brainstorming as an effective technique for large writing
projects. Get together as a group, brainstorm an outline for each section,
then assign the sections out to small writing teams.

Accomplished several fairly large projects this way. I think it works because
even though people aren't necessarily brain storming for their section, they
can bring valuable insight to the person who has to do the writing.

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divadong
I must say all this proves is that MOST people (random selection of people)
aren't GOOD at brainstorming. Having worked with highly-trained and practiced
brainstormers, I think you can train yourself to be good at coming up with
ideas in a group setting.

However, the "intermediate Q proximity" idea is definitely spot on.

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divadong
Bob Sutton from Stanford has studied this a long time and he gives a very
interesting response to this article:
[http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/brainstorming...](http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/brainstorming_i.html)

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ZeroGravitas
Isn't a contradiction to say that uncritically listening to a groups ideas
doesn't stimulate creativity and then to follow that up by saying that
listening to other people's ideas, even very wrong ones, increases creativity?

~~~
harshreality
The way I read it, it's more of a social interaction phenomenon than whether
ideas are inherently good or bad.

Something about knowing that people in the group disagree with some idea
that's presented, and the reasons why they disagree, might be more important
for improving your creativity than your own isolated assessment that an idea
you heard is wrong.

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ImprovedSilence
Perhaps it doesn't work for companies and bureaucracies, but it works
fantastically well for me, with a lil light music and warm lighting in the
background, a blank sheet of paper (unlined) and an ink pen.

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ericxtang
I've captured a lot of my thoughts about this here:
<http://www.erictang.org/process/2012/02/16/brainstorming/>

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itmag
I always find it funny when people "disprove" stuff I use successfully every
day with my friends.

~~~
dochtman
I always find it funny when people believe anecdotes over actual science.

On-topic: these are the kinds of results from psychology that most people here
should hopefully know already.

~~~
itmag
I always find it funny when people consider my "anecdotes" to be self-
evidently delusional and utterly useless.

Guess I should just tell dozens of people that the years of frequent
brainstorming we've engaged in has been a complete waste of time. Science says
so!

~~~
vacri
That is not what dochtman is saying.

