
Group brainstorming is a waste of time (2015) - sciurus
https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time
======
crispyambulance
It depends on the group.

Small groups where everyone knows each other and are skilled at communication,
experienced at problem-solving with each other, and don't have psychological
safety issues--- sure, they can brainstorm together and stimulate creative
thinking.

I expect that what the hbr guy has in mind is a table of shark-like MBA's,
each with something to prove, hide, or vanquish. Yeah, that's not good for a
brainstorming session, it will just become a feeding frenzy.

~~~
ghaff
Enough with the stereotypes. We can probably agree that a table of _people_
who are all trying to "win" whatever their degrees and motivations is probably
not the best way to tackle a problem.

~~~
Frost1x
Definitely. In environments where there's clearly a form of competition (most
business environments), brainstorming often turns into a silly exercise of ego
and political play more than a judgement free arena to generate ideas and
offer true constructive criticism.

If you're in a business environment where you have a team where everyone isn't
trying to make sure they have an opportunity to get paid more than you,
receive a promotion before you, have their idea "win" for RDD, or have more
job security when resourcss are tight, then count your blessings.

I've worked in these environments and you can truly innovate, it's marvelous
and fun even if the work is challenging. It requires teams who are
understanding of one another, have humility, and are shielded by some manager
or business policy who/that allows for this sort of dynamic. It's pretty rare,
unfortunately.

~~~
ghaff
I guess I've had a better experience in general.

~~~
ilikeerp
Or maybe you were never a shark, never progressed beyond the bottom levels and
were never really in charge of anything substantial?

My kids sometimes feel like they've made life changing and important decisions
when in reality I just gave them a choice between two pairs of shoes to go to
the park.

The tech equivalent is owning a small product at a big company, feels like
you're the man but the CEO doesn't give a toss and you're not strategic.

~~~
ghaff
What a destructive attitude.

~~~
ilikeerp
Sorry if that sounded mean but he just dismissed everything the parent said
based on him thinking his professional life hasn't presented common
challenges. I'm saying that if he has never dealt with competitive behaviours
then maybe he's not really competing, even if he thinks he is.

I've been through that revelation myself and used it as motivation to up my
game. The fact you jumpes up my arse just because I said something that you
consider unkind really highlights the lack of diversity in thought in your
life. Maybe you're surrounded by yes men and you yourself cannot handle
competitive behaviours either.

------
redelbee
How valuable is the “making your team feel good” result mentioned at the end
of the article? I think good team cohesion and understanding are valuable
outcomes of brainstorms that can be overlooked.

In my experience at an advertising agency “Making people feel good” was the
best result of brainstorming, but certainly not the only one. Everyone had a
chance to voice their ideas and offer feedback on other ideas. In the end the
ideas usually ended up coming from the people who were great at making ideas,
and the tactical executions of those ideas came from the people who were good
at making ideas come to life, and sometimes they combined to make an even
better idea and execution.

As a creative leader I also required each person involved in the brainstorm to
do individual work beforehand. Perhaps this is why we saw good results.

Either way, measuring brainstorming success by number of ideas or some other
measure of “creativity” is likely missing out on the social benefits of the
process.

~~~
Frost1x
>As a creative leader I also required each person involved in the brainstorm
to do individual work beforehand.

This is overlooked. There's an inherent assumption with brainstorming that you
start from nothing and form ideas. The issue is that you need some context
around what you're generating ideas for to shape them. It also helps to have
time to shape these ideas before sharing them, even at the "first stage." This
allows everyone time to form some early ideas and shape them in a way they can
easily express them so others understand the vision and can iterate, mutate,
etc. around a solid understanding around the shape of the context. You don't
need weeks but at least an evening to casually/informally think over things is
typically enough.

If you dont do this, you get some initial thoughts with a lack of any data and
everyone asking lots of questions around context instead of forming ideas
around the context. Essentially, you spend time finding the cursory data you
need to have a proper brainstorming session. Then you get ideas that had no
time to form. People can typically generate ideas and iterate out sets of bad
ideas themselves. The remaining potentially good ideas are the ones perfect
for a brainstorming session. From my experience, this is where valuable group
brainstorming starts and takes on a life of its own.

------
hirundo
> In fact, a great deal of evidence indicates that brainstorming actually
> harms creative performance, resulting in a collective performance loss that
> is the very opposite of synergy.

This is my experience. It's difficult to get under the surface of a problem in
a committee. Better to take the same group, state the issue, then ask everyone
to separately go on a long walk and think about it. _Then_ come back and
perform group memetic meiosis on the solutions.

~~~
hanniabu
From my experience the best comes from a combination of both. Everyone think
separately and come up with your own solutions, then meet as a group and
everyone goes over their ideas, then go one by one and list the pros and cons
of each solution. Typically you can eliminate half right off the bat. Then you
go through each of the remaining ones and brainstorm how you can tweak it to
maximize the pros and minimize the cons. Sometimes you can't make any changes
and sometimes you end up combining different parts of different solutions into
one.

Note that this will only work in small groups, like 3-5 people or so.

------
inetsee
"Social Anxiety: People worry about other team members’ views of their ideas."

One way of dealing with this problem is to do Anonymous Brainstorming
[https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=2579](https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=2579)

The idea, in a nutshell, is that there is a facilitator. The members of the
team do not meet in person. They send their ideas to the facilitator, who
aggregates the ideas and sends the complete list out to the members of the
team. This is intended to remove the social effects that might interfere with
some of the team members participating fully, or other members dominating the
process because of their perceived position in the hierarchy, or their better
social skills.

An advanced version of this involves rounds; everybody sends their ideas to
the facilitator, the complete list goes out to everybody, the members critique
or support some of the ideas, the facilitator adds the new input and sends the
revised list back out to the team, and the process repeats (presumably until
there is some agreement on the best idea(s), or everybody gets tired if doing
it).

My recollection is that this process can be very effective at problem solving,
but it certainly isn't as quick as getting a bunch of people in a room to hash
out some ideas.

~~~
Rapzid
I'm going to plug my old employer here for this,
[https://www.polleverywhere.com/](https://www.polleverywhere.com/) . We
heavily used the service internally and the anonymous "Q&A" used for retros
and brainstorming was eye-opening to say the least.

------
benjiweber
One can counter these challenges when facilitating a group session by
including separating diverge and converge phases. Give people time to work
individually without influence by the group before sharing and combining the
best perspectives of the whole group.

Often when a brainstorm session is run in a way where everyone's work is
immediately visible to everone else people get anchored early and miss out on
good ideas.

This could be as simple as everyone spending a few mins jotting down their
ideas separately before sharing them in a group chat, or on a whiteboard.

~~~
ghaff
Yeah, I'm working on a couple of things right now where people are commenting
on a larger document, individuals and subgroups are going off to work on
things and come back to present, get feedback, rinse and repeat. It's
incremental iteration and convergence.

------
corpMaverick
From the same author. I think this is quite interesting.

"Why do so many incompetent men become leaders?"

[https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-
men](https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men)

I read article years ago and I couldn't find it until just now.

~~~
tropdrop
This was a great read - thanks!

------
askafriend
Brainstorming accomplishes a lot that you can't measure.

Just like casual water cooler conversations result in ideas that wouldn't have
seen the light of day otherwise (and this is why office design is important
too!).

All this stuff matters. There's different ways to go about it (and different
methods can accomplish similar goals), but to blanket declare brainstorming
generally as placebo with no effect is just wrong in my view.

~~~
de1978st
I agree, I haven't read the article yet, but I will say, brainstorming in my
experience is actually a form of entertainment.

There is nothing more rewarding to me having worked in IT than being able to
collaborate with others.

This is not about getting a project done, or building.

This is more about looking back on the course of my career and realizing the
only important things are the fellowships gained throughout, otherwise, its
all just IT shit, at the end of the day, anyway.

------
vanderZwan
When I taught design for a year I was forced to give a lecture on how to do
brainstorming as well. It just so happened that I hated classic brainstorming
with a passion. So I subverted the lesson by making it a long rant about
everything wrong about brainstorming, with research to back it up, while
suggesting other methods of ideating together instead. I shared the link to
the slides here once before, it seemed to be well-received (there were
anonymous viewers looking at that presentation for many months after sharing)
so I might as well link it again[0][1][2].

[0]
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB0a54ePU2PEQsILQnwWgY9KU/edit#slide=id.p)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15237174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15237174)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15241373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15241373)

~~~
bostonvaulter2
I remember reading this a few years ago. Well worth the re-read.

------
bonestormii_
I don't think well in groups, because conversation is distracting. I think
this applies to everyone when the subject matter is deeper than like,
advertising or something superficially creative.

The value of brainstorming is mainly the suspension of criticism, and it's an
important part of any creative task, even if applied alone. I see it all the
time--a very smart person with lots of aptitude who can't write, can't draw,
can't code, can't do anything because any small attempt is immediately "not
good enough".

The suspension of criticism is necessary in order to push through. You can't
run from the problems forever, but I do think that making some shitty version
of something before you make a good version is... necessary? You never really
know what you are doing until the shitty version exists and you can see the
problems, and subsequently the solutions.

~~~
valuearb
Its the same reason that open work spaces aren't just productivity killers,
they are creativity killers. Both require a rational thought process, randomly
interjecting other ideas from the people chattering in the room rarely helps.

~~~
bonestormii_
Exactly. That said, a one-on-one type thing with someone you trust can be
great.

------
csours
Group Brainstorming may be a waste of time if you only consider the ideas from
that brainstorming session; but if you consider group brainstorming as a
communication session, then you should also look at the ideas that those
involved come up with and develop later.

------
Puts
Has anybody else noticed that when walking in a group of more than 3 you end
up in a really uncomfortable tempo? It's like everybody tries to adjust to the
slowest, but nobody knows who the slowest is so you end up in a really weird
and slow tempo that really no one ever would walk in normally?

I tend to think that this even happens mentally to groups. We start to think
slower when we are in a group of other people. I guess this is why discussions
on social events also ends up on subjects like celebrities and sports rather
than abstract philosophical topics.

------
robomartin
I am about five months into burning time and money brainstorming for a
solution to a problem. Our client insisted in having "the team" participate.
Never mind that we knew exactly where to go and what to implement five months
ago (experience matters).

We could have been a couple of iterations into a real solution by now (this is
hardware+software) rather than being nowhere while everyone understands what
they don't understand and finally understands that what we said five months
ago was the correct path.

Rather than being critical, sometimes one needs to realize that people and
organizations, at times, require going through a process before accepting
reality or agreeing with a conclusion. I've seen this many times during my
career, from simple problems to designs that are currently orbiting our
planet.

It's unfortunate because it burns time, money and valuable human capital
(people could be doing far more valuable things).

------
programmarchy
Brainstorming is usually done in a pretty haphazard manner, so I'm not
surprised by these results. Just getting minds in a room is not enough.

The hub-and-spoke model was used at AT&T labs, where individuals or small
teams descend into "spokes" to do deep work, then return to a "hub" to
synthesize results and plan future directions.

You also need solid leadership to provide direction and organization, although
I suppose there's exceptions to that rule like Valve's holocracy. I'd be
curious how something like the Manhattan Project was organized.

------
fluffernutter
I had a colleague recently take CliftonStrengths. Their "skills" were equally
balanced across all 4 categories and they have a history of "getting things
done" although not always doing all things to the point they are "correctly
done".

When I took it a few years back all my skills were clumped into strategy,
which might explain why just doing strategy isn't necessary a way to get
things done and may be a waste of time if done to excess.

~~~
ghaff
Strategy is important but it can also devolve into "writing thick reports that
no one reads."

I was involved in an expert witness report a number of years back which
involved going through a bunch of depositions. I remember reading through the
deposition of one senior executive who was basically asked "But your corporate
strategy office said this initiative was important. Are you saying you
disagree?" And his response was basically that the corporate strategy office
writes a lot of things [that I don't pay much mind to].

------
yboris
Reminds me of the wonderful book "The Wisdom of Crowds". The author points out
under what conditions 'crowds' (or a group of people) can come together with a
better answer than any individual.

Primary take-away relevant to this situation is to have independent thought,
and to have independent voicing/collecting of ideas.

It's rather dangerous for a 'leader' of the group to express an opinion, only
to have everyone confirm so as to score points.

~~~
georgeecollins
I think you are missing the point of the wisdom of crowds. Crowds are great at
aggregating the influence the various factors that go into a complex problem.
The example from the book was (I think) that crowds were great at say,
estimating the weight of a cow. Or, in modern terms, the price of a stock.

Crowds are terrible at being creative whether they are lead by a person or
not.

~~~
ghaff
"Wisdom of crowds" is pretty fascinating in that it does really well under
some circumstances.

A friend of mine has been running an Oscar contest for years and I grabbed
some data from him a few years ago. We knew that "consensus" did well but I
actually did some graphs and analysis; it's pretty striking:
[https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-
predicti...](https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-prediction-
and-other-data.html)

Undergrad, we were were both on the movie committee where we had an
attendance-guessing contest that had similar results.

But... outside of some very specific and often artificial circumstances where
the effect is very robust. It doesn't really work.

------
jyriand
Is brainstorming witha group even a thing nowadays? Last time I did some
brainstorming with a group was in a high school.

~~~
alistairSH
IME, not in the literal sense covered by the article.

With my teams, we'll meet, chat about a problem, go out separate ways for a
while, then regroup. Or, we'll send one expert off to do some solo
thinking/analysis, and bring it back and we'll all discuss it, then send that
person off again. Which way depends on the problem and the individuals
involved.

------
russfink
I am most creative when I'm invited to attend a lengthy meeting that becomes
boring. Doodles on the page lead me to wonder is there some better way to do
all of this? anyone else feel this way, too?

~~~
jlokier
I'm creative in meetings, but probably have better ideas after the meeting is
over.

 _L 'esprit de l'escalier._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier)

------
omarhaneef
These are the reasons group brainstorming is a waste of time, and they can all
be addressed by a simple hack, which is that each person writes down all their
ideas in advance before sharing the list and discussing them in public:

Social loafing: There’s a tendency – also known as free riding – for people to
make less of an effort when they are working in teams than alone. As with the
bystander effect, we feel less propelled to do something when we know other
people might do it.

Social anxiety: People worry about other team members’ views of their ideas.
This is also referred to as evaluation apprehension. Similarly, when team
members perceive that others have more expertise, their performance declines.
This is especially problematic for introverted and less confident individuals.

Regression to the mean: This is the process of downward adjustment whereby the
most talented group members end up matching the performance of their less
talented counterparts. This effect is well known in sports – if you practice
with someone less competent than you, your competence level declines and you
sink to the mediocrity of your opponent.

Production blocking: No matter how large the group, individuals can only
express a single idea at one time if they want other group members to hear
them. Studies have found that the number of suggestions plateaus with more
than six or seven group members, and that the number of ideas per person
declines as group size increases.

~~~
asdfman123
I wonder if the early successes of "brainstorming" come from having someone at
the front of the room saying, "No, really guys, ALL ideas are welcome" and
allowing the quieter types to speak up.

The special sauce was asserting a commitment to psychological safety.

However, now brainstorming has become a corporate cliché, and actually
allowing new ideas is scary, so we all understand when people ask for
"brainstorming" they mean just bring up every mediocre idea you can think of
that's not too offensive.

~~~
dafoex
I have somewhat a hypothesis that brainstorming had early successes due to the
perceived democracy of it - i.e. everyone gets a chance to say how we do the
thing - but started to become a poorly managed chore when the big extroverts
and the office hierarchies got dragged into to meeting room, so everyone just
sort of lets the loudest voice in the room dictate the project while the
bosses pat themselves on the back for letting everyone have a say (if they can
get a word in edgeways past loud Larry).

------
JoeAltmaier
I'm not gonna throw out crazy ideas, when I'm the senior person in the room
and know what the result should look like. I don't want to spend the next week
showing folks that a triangle can't have four sides, or whatever.

There are few times in my life, where brainstorming would get me where I
wanted to go.

------
fuzzfactor
Brainstorm solutions, not needs.

------
ThomPete
that really depend on the group

