Brainstorming and creativity ...

My guess is that everyone reading this blog has at one time or another faced the concept of "brainstorming". Maybe you sought to increase motivation in your department, maybe you were looking for new ideas to market your products or maybe you were just out of ideas for the next office party. Either way, you want to be creative. The concept behind brainstorming is fairly simple, there's a few key points to it. As usual, Wikipedia is golden:

1. Focus on quantity: This rule is a means of enhancing divergent production, aiming to facilitate problem solving through the maxim quantity breeds quality. The assumption is that the greater the number of ideas generated, the greater the chance of producing a radical and effective solution.
2. Withhold criticism: In brainstorming, criticism of ideas generated should be put 'on hold'. Instead, participants should focus on extending or adding to ideas, reserving criticism for a later 'critical stage' of the process. By suspending judgment, participants will feel free to generate unusual ideas.
3. Welcome unusual ideas: To get a good and long list of ideas, unusual ideas are welcomed. They can be generated by looking from new perspectives and suspending assumptions. These new ways of thinking may provide better solutions.
4. Combine and improve ideas: Good ideas may be combined to form a single better good idea, as suggested by the slogan "1+1=3". It is believed to stimulate the building of ideas by a process of association.^[1]

The theory goes that people are afraid of "feeling stupid" and therefore it's very important not to criticise during the first stages of brainstorming. If you're afraid to say the wrong thing, often you don't say anything at all (as proved by many studies on group psychology). You focus on getting as many ideas a possibly under a limited time, quality is not in focus in this stage.

1958, there was an empirical study made on the subject of brainstorm as technique. 48 male test subjects were split into 12 groups and were then told to solve a bunch of "creative puzzles". The technique to be used was Brainstorming, as it were described by Alex Osborn in Your creative power. There were also a control group of 48 male students who were each to solve the puzzle individually. The control group came up with twice as many solutions, which were also dubbed superior by "experts" on the subject of creative puzzles (whatever that means..).

What makes me curious is that I can't find more studies on this subject. Does this mean that the first study was considered "complete"? And if so: Howcome that so many companies are still using brainstorming as a method? Somewhere deep inside I want to believe that the human is a rational being, but this doesn't seem very rational at all. Or maybe the reality is that the study didn't really answer the full question, maybe there are other variants of brainstorming that are more efficient and far superior?

Steve Jobs was a strong advocate for group thinking (not necessarily brainstorming) where he claimed that most ideas are born from conversation and discussion. This is an interesting theory. Personally I don't believe in brainstorming as an efficient method for finding creative solutions. Although I would like to make a bigger study where the subjects are to "brainstorm" individually and later discuss this in a group environment. Maybe this study has been made already?

What I question is the possibility to "create" creativity. I don't think that creativity can be made or enhanced, although it can certainly be broken. The best thing we can do is to don't disrupt creativity in action. So, how do we do this? Management by staying out of the way? Management by asking no questions? I don't have a clue, I'm not very creative.

Another time I will write a little something on what Google thinks of creativity, how their project groups are set up and how they encourage their employees to work. Another time.