It’s a familiar ritual in offices across the world: Wipe down the whiteboard; line up the water bottles; break out the markers and multi-colored Post-It notes. It’s time for a brainstorm.
These judgment-free, popcorn-like ideas jams are so ubiquitous in business today that it’s hard to imagine a time when they weren’t the norm. But the concept of “brainstorming” only became popular in the late 1930s, when Alex Osborn of the New York City-based advertising giant BBDO brought his team together to think up new ad campaigns to win back clients lost during the Great Depression.
It’s easy to see why Osborn’s ideation method caught on globally, writes Columbia Business School professor and decision-making expert Sheena Iyengar in her recent book, “Think Bigger: How to Innovate.” Brainstorming feels appealingly democratic, allowing junior staffers to be heard in spaces where previously only top leaders felt comfortable speaking up. And, Iyengar points out, brainstorming can be fun and create goodwill on teams. (Indeed, it’s often cited as one of the benefits for workers of returning to offices.)
But, she asks in her book, does brainstorming do what it’s supposed to do? “Does it actually generate great ideas?” Hardly ever, she posits—at least as it’s generally practiced.
“Brainstorming doesn’t work,” she told Fortune. “It’s been well established now since the 1990s. It’s just that industry hasn't fully caught up to it because they don’t have an alternative.”
Brainstorming can lead to ‘idea diarrhea’
Today’s “no bad ideas” brainstorms, practiced in Silicon Valley and beyond, look quite different from the male-dominated ones Osborn pioneered at BBDO (an agency that was part of the inspiration for the TV show Mad Men). But the fundamentals of brainstorming have not changed much in the eight decades-plus since Osborn created his method, as described in his 1966 New York Times obituary:
At brainstorming meetings a group of men are asked to give as many solutions as they can to a given problem. As the group calls out possible answers, no matter how implausible, a secretary jots them down. After the meeting, an executive uses his judicial mind and sorts out the acceptable and unacceptable ideas.
IDEO, the design and consulting firm renowned for its approach to “design thinking,” lays out a strikingly similar set of rules to Osborn’s:
Defer Judgment
Encourage Wild Ideas
Build on the Ideas of Others
Stay Focused on the Topic
One Conversation at a Time
Be Visual
Go for Quantity
These rules may sound sensible, but taken together as a system, they can throttle innovation, Iyengar says. For one thing, the notion that hierarchies are erased in a brainstorm is an illusion; junior staffers still feel anxious and unwilling to take risks, experts on creativity and productivity have argued, so brainstorming is routinely hindered by participants’ social anxiety and awareness of hierarchies.
Then there are group dynamics at play such as “regression to the mean,” where higher performing team members adjust their performance down to match the group—leading to a whole lot of mediocre ideas that aren’t implemented or don’t end up working.
And even just the basic idea of encouraging a large quantity of wild ideas, “no matter how implausible,” releases participants from having to consider what ideas are actually feasible, Iyenger says. This can result in what she calls “idea diarrhea.”
“What happens when I ask you to come up with an idea right now? You’re going to come up with whatever happens to be accessible,” Iyengar tells Fortune. “When you get people to belt them out there fast, you’re doing two things: They’re belting out ideas that have no basis in reality... And second, they’re coming up with the lowest hanging fruit. It’s whatever happens to be available to them. Usually in a brainstorm, they’re more likely to generate redundant ideas.”
Replace your next brainstorm with the ‘toothpick exercise’
There’s a better way, Iyengar suggests, and instead of Post-It notes and breakout groups, it requires sustained solitary thinking: Her six-step process involves spending more time upfront considering the problem from different perspectives, researching widely, and seeking useful comparisons and analogues by looking at how other people or industries have solved similar problems.
Only as the last step in the ideation process should one bring an idea to the group, Iyengar argues. Even then, she cautions, it’s important to set clear parameters: “You’re not asking for their feedback or judgment about the quality of your idea. Rather, you want to know what they see in your idea to help you see it better yourself. In so doing, you further develop your idea and determine if it’s something you truly want to pursue.”
In “Think Bigger,” Iyengar describes an exercise she has used with students and in workshops for business leaders:
Take out a pen and paper and think of a toothpick. Now time yourself.
In the next two minutes, come up with as many ideas as possible for how to make use of a toothpick.
Ready. Set. Go.
Two minutes are up. Stop.
She asks the participants to go through the same process once again. And again. Then she has them look at their three lists of ideas and assess where in the process the best ideas happened. Most people, she says, have their best ideas in the third round of the exercise. “In your first toothpick round, you probably went after the low-hanging fruit—the most common uses for a toothpick,” she writes. “In the second round, you felt a bit stretched as you struggled to come up with new ideas that you’ve never actually seen a toothpick used for. When I asked you to do the third round, you may have said to yourself, ‘Not again!’ But lo and behold, when I pushed you further, you came through with your best ideas.”
The point is to reach beyond the obvious ideas, to do the sustained work necessary to come up with something new by learning from the existing ideas and approaches. “Innovation,” Iyengar writes, “is nothing more, and nothing less, than a new combination of old ideas.”
Instead of seeking ideas only from those who happen to be in the room for a brainstorm, Iyengar suggests, consider how others in the world have successfully solved analogous problems. It’s the approach that famously led to Henry Ford’s installation of the first moving assembly line for cars in 1913. Ford’s chief engineer, William “Pa” Klann came up with the idea after watching the process of butchering a whole animal in a slaughterhouse.
“Henry Ford did not ask his engineers to brainstorm,” Iyengar writes. “He asked them to search the world for ideas to use—that’s how Pa Klann found the moving meatpacking line.”
Iyengar is not the first to point out the problems with brainstorming. Even back in 1991 a review of the existing research on productivity loss in brainstorming groups was scathing about the practice, calling the popularity of brainstorming “unequivocally and substantively misguided.”
Still, don’t be surprised if you’re pulled into a brainstorm at work tomorrow. As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote in Harvard Business Review, “brainstorming continues to be used because it feels intuitively right to do so. As such, it is one more placebo in the talent management cabinet, believed to work in spite of the clear absence of evidence.”
