Alternate Solo & Team
Brainstorming is a well-known (and popularly-derided) practice of generating ideas together. Popularized by advertising exec Alex Osborn in the early 1950’s, it’s the kind of universally-acknowledged practice that would make for the perfect backdrop of an episode of The Office. At the d.school, we take pains to teach “good brainstorm etiquette” specifically due to folks’ exposure to the bad kind often found in corporate environments.
What’s the best set-up to maximize creative output of a group ideation session?
One study suggests that the key lies in alternating between individual and group modalities: “Three experiments were designed to test the efficacy of ideation procedures that involved alternation of individual and group idea generation sessions (hybrid brainstorming) as compared to traditional individual and group ideation. The hybrid condition led to the best performance in terms of number of ideas generated… The results of the experiments support the original suggestion by Osborn (1953) that the most effective brainstorming process is one that involves a variation in individual and group ideation” (Runa Korde and Paul B. Paulus, Journal of Experimental Psychology, May 2017).
The experiments demonstrated that groups that alternated between individual and group work outperformed both the only-individual modality, as well as the only-group modality.
One thing that struck me is that these findings can be undermined by a familiar psychological phenomenon: the need for cognitive closure. Many teams’ implicit goal (if not explicit) is to settle on an answer at the end of a session. What this study shows is that perhaps a better strategy is to defer the selection process for at least one meeting, giving the individuals in the group a chance to individually marinate on the outputs of the group work, perhaps improving upon them in the intervening individual work time.
If a group is willing to defer the selection of the “best” idea just a bit, my expectation is that the collective improvements that individuals make to the consideration set would be significant.
If you’re looking to mix up a group brainstorm, here’s a fun, research-backed twist: Try Brainspeedstormwriting
Related: Resist the Need for Closure
Related: Be Obvious
Related: Generate Bad Ideas
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The quality of our thinking is deeply influenced by the diversity of the inputs we collect. Implementing practices like Brian Grazer’s “Curiosity Conversations” ensures innovators are well-equipped with a variety of high-quality raw material for problem-solving.