One study found that most groups never generate more than two ideas in a typical brainstorming session. I'm a big believer in emphasizing quantity as a way to drive quality, so this was deeply troubling to me. I've mentioned the well-established tendency to "declare victory" too quickly, but two ideas??? I mean, come on...

The aforementioned "enlightening but tough-going research paper, 'The Social Psychology of Design Thinking'" suggests a couple of alternatives to conventional brainstorming, designed to boost output:

"Brainwriting. The key problem in brainstorming is that people in groups often self-censor and cannot generate ideas because they need to be polite and listen to others—something called the politeness ritual. Since the advent of brainstorming, more effective idea generation techniques have been developed by design thinkers and their firms as well as by laboratory social scientists. For example, brainwriting is an extension and modification of brainstorming. Specifically, brainwriting is the simultaneous generation of written ideas by members of groups. This is usually accomplished by instructing individuals in the group to record all of their ideas silently for a few minutes after which a facilitator collects the ideas. As compared with brainstorming, brainwriting is dramatically superior. This can be seen in the lab, as well as in practical applications. For example, one meta-analysis revealed that groups that engage in brainwriting generate about 2.5 times the volume of ideas and have a significantly greater percentage of their ideas judged to be of higher quality. Similarly, in idea generation sessions at companies like IDEO, designers regularly use highly structured, iterative approaches to dramatically increase the volume of ideas.

Speedstorming—a mash-up of brainstorming and speed-dating—is akin to pairwise brainstorming. Everyone in a group has an opportunity for a two-person brainstorm with everyone else in the group. Speedstorming is an ideal method for approaching complex problems and has been successfully implemented in multidisciplinary teams in the public sector (e.g., city and community innovations), education (e.g., ideathons in undergraduate education), as well as nanoscience collaborations."

I might advocate a third approach, "Brainspeedstormwriting," (TM, though admittedly it's a mouthful) which, in a combination of the above methods, advocates passing individually-prepared lists around the room in a speed-dating like format, but instead of "daters" being peer-to-peer, they're peer-to-paper, where every group member gets a "date" with a piece of paper being passed around the room. By the time each contributor receives back their own paper, there are many (scores, if not hundreds) of new variants based on either their ideas, or offshoots of earlier rotations of dating. I'm a fan because it creates an implicit idea quota.

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