We all know the scenario: lots of people gather in a room to brainstorm a problem, resolving idea, discuss on schedule, or mission plan. Veterans approach with scepticism, newly employed think it will be interesting, and after an hour — or two or three — has passed, they all emerge drained, depressed, and demotivated. Why is this such a recurrent story?
Some academics try to understand what goes wrong in brainstorming. Sometimes there are too many ideas and we can’t keep them all in our heads. Then there’s the phenomenon psychologists call ‘social loafing,’ which we probably all recognize: the people who sit at the back of the room either does not contributing or reluctant to speak up at all. Only slightly less lazy is ‘social matching,’ which means that we are very likely to contribute lots of ideas so similar to each other as to be indistinguishable; it feels like we’re making a contribution, but the range and variety of suggestions remains small. Conformity plays a big part here; our desire to belong ( just to keep in line with what the boss says ! ! ) restricts the breadth of ideas we might think of but and do not wish to speak up and offer. Sometimes you speak up and the boss think otherwise, and your idea gets gunned down, though you really felt that yours is more appropriate solution.
Working from examples only makes things worse. All of our ‘new’ ideas cluster around that, and we fail to be as broad-ranging and wild in our creativity as we need to be. So if we are trying to improve on a procedure that has some flaws, we create more flaws than if we had started from scratch. Moreover, creativity declines with time. In experiments, students from a university were asked to come up with ideas for improving their school. After twenty minutes, their ideas were coded (for variety, novelty, quantity and range of categories), and what was striking was how fast the group ran out of steam: the first five minutes were the most productive !
Most intriguing of all was that brainstorming "alone" proved to be more effective than brainstorming collectively. In those first five minutes, participants who sat at a computer and generated ideas came up with 44 percent more ideas than those in a group. This challenges received wisdom that says groups of people will come up with a wider range of ideas than similar minded people or those working alone. But what it takes into account is that when we come together, like it or not,we all start to become a little homogenized. What this finding implies is that the way to get the creative value of diversity — and every company I know finds this a challenge — is to encourage people to develop ideas alone, and only then bring them together.
Ask CEOs or GMs what they spend most time doing and the answer is always the same: attending brainstorm meetings. Then ask how much time they devote to improving their meeting skills and you’ll get blank looks. We spend most of our time on an activity we were never trained for.
What happens in most brainstorm meetings? The most senior person — who usually called the brainstorm meeting — sits at the head of a table. Others drift in. If you’re lucky, you start only 5 or 10 minutes late. The issue, problem or question is identified, and then the brainstorming ritual begins. Just like some people at school always sat in the front row, some in meetings always speak first — and there will always be the laggards who wait to see how the wind is blowing. And then there are what we call the ‘social loafers’ — the individuals who always turn up and contribute nothing. For half an hour or more, a vast amount of second-guessing occurs, as everyone gropes for the answer that will receive the boss's or General Manager's blessing.
What is wrong with group brainstorming meetings? One of the mistakes leaders or bosses make most often is to underestimate the power of one’s own presence. This has nothing to do with charisma. If you’re the most senior person in the room, people will defer to you, and that usually means they’ll think less because when they say something differently, they are worried the boss disagrees to the contributions and everyone tends to swing with the wind and play along to get close to the boss's "preferred" idea or solution.
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