Brainstorming - Is It Worth The Effort, And Does Online Software Do It Better?

In Adrian Furnham's article "The Brainstorming Myth", Furnham reviewed literature on Brainstorming over the last 50 years. Furnham argued that:

1. The experimental evidence for brainstorming does not support the notion that face to face brainstorming sessions are as effective as they are claimed to be
2. Online brainstorming tools (such as those found in Idea Management Systems) facilitate more effective brainstorming sessions than face-to-face group brainstorming sessions
3. Face-to-face brainstorming sessions can be improved for better outcomes
   

Furnham's theme is explored and elaborated at greater length in Mongeau and Morr's 1999 article "Reconsidering Brainstorming".

These articles make interesting reading.

A key piece of research cited by both Furnham and by Mongeau and Morr and underlying a stream of subsequent research is some (1958) research from Donald Taylor (et al).

Taylor's research team argued that it is inappropriate to compare the brainstorming output of a group of people with with that of an individual, as Alex Osborn had done in support of his brainstorming methodology. In order to determine if group synergies had added value, the brainstorming output of a group of X people should instead be compared with the aggregated brainstorming output from X individuals. Taylor termed the latter aggregation a "nominal group", and proceeded to compare the brainstorming performance of actual brainstorming sessions with that of nominal groups. The expectation was that if Alex Osborn's theories regarding Brainstorming were correct, the actual brainstorming group sessions should outperform the nominal group.

Taylor's team found that the converse was the case - it was found that nominal groups outperformed actual brainstorming groups.

As detailed in the above mentioned articles, Taylor's research has been supported by later research. This body of research has suggested that one key exception is when the group members are interacting or brainstorming together online through online brainstorming software (such as Idea Management Software).

But these results need to be understood in context. Did Taylor (and later researchers) really evaluate the "brainstorming" methodology as Osborne had introduced it? And are the findings in relation to the value of face-to-face brainstorming as damning as they might first appear?

Were the sessions run by skilled group facilitators?

It is pertinent to observe firstly that in Taylor's research, the participants in the study were 96 undergraduate "juniors and seniors" at Yale, and the facilitators for both the group and individual sessions were two "advanced graduate students in psychology." The total prior experience of the facilitators in brainstorming was obtained during "pre-testing" of the problems to be posed to the study groups by the research team, just prior to running the study. In addition, the facilitators were not focused on one discussion session, but apparently divided their time between two brainstorming groups simultaneously. The length of the brainstorming sessions was limited to only12 minutes, this length being chosen on the basis of being around the estimated time people could keep suggesting ideas without a significant pause.

The level of experience in group facilitation in general and brainstorming facilitation in particular during the study is important. The level of facilitation skills demonstrated has a potential impact on possible "process loss" in the group. "Process loss" is the loss of productivity that can arise in group sessions due to factors such as only one person being able to speak at a time, bottlenecks in one person writing down/recording ideas, or any challenges faced by the facilitator in stewarding the group through to a positive outcome. In this context the level of facilitation skill in general, and familiarity with brainstorming skills in particular, is critically important. If one is going to assess the performance of a "nominal group" in relation to that of a brainstorming group, the level of experience of the group and in particular the level of facilitation skills is not unimportant and needs to be addressed in the study design.

Were the groups doing brainstorming as Osborn had defined it?

Secondly, in Taylor's "nominal group" research both the brainstorming groups and the individuals in the nominal groups were given the same training in "brainstorming" techniques.

This training consisted of a one hour class or lecture on brainstorming, a description of the research agenda, provision of a one-page article on brainstorming reproduced from Time, and reviewing four key "rules" of brainstorming, that

• criticism is ruled out
• free-wheeling is welcomed
• quantity is wanted
• combination and improvement is sought
  

Third, in Osborn's articulation of brainstorming, it is vitally important to provide a clear and simple statement of the problem to the group participants before they attend the session, in order to give them time to mull over the problem and start generating ideas. However, in Taylor's research, the problem statements were not sent out in advance but rather read out at the start of the session.

Fourth, Osborn suggests that "experience has . . . indicated that the ideal [brainstorming] panel should consist of a leader, an associate leader, about five regular or "core" members and about five guests." Taylor's study made no attempt to include an associate leader or experienced "core" members.

It is clear, therefore, that in Taylor et al's study, there are question marks regarding whether Osborn's brainstorming processes were followed, including whether the facilitators had sufficient training and experience to achieve substantial group synergies, whether participants had sufficient advance notice of the problems to be considered, or whether the structure of the brainstorming group reflected Osborn's ideal. If Osborn's brainstorming processes were not clearly followed, question marks exist regarding the validity of Taylor et al's conclusions regarding the productivity of nominal groups in relation to brainstorming groups.

Did the success of nominal groups disprove or prove the value of brainstorming?

Putting aside whether or not Taylor had addressed Osborn's methodology fully and accurately, the notion of nominal groups merits further consideration in itself.

Very early in the history of brainstorming, Alex Osborne's ideas were taken up by Sidney Parnes and others, who were concerned with the question of whether brainstorming techniques could benefit individuals. Parnes et al packaged brainstorming principles into an approach or method for individual creativity, which they called the Creative Problem Solving process. The Creative Problem Solving process was researched and supported by this group and a wider community of scholars, who sought to demonstrate the Creative Problems Solving techniques could be taught and that the technique improved the quantity and quality of individual creative output.

Creative Problem Solving was based on similar principles to the four points of brainstorming articulated by Taylor.

The fact that the individuals in Taylor's "nominal groups" were given the same training in the principles of brainstorming as the brainstorming groups suggests that, in effect, individuals in nominal groups were being taught the creativity principles underlying brainstorming, in a form similar to that developed in early versions of Creative Problem Solving - and if the principles of Creative Problem Solving are valid, then individual's creative output should have been elevated to some extent as a consequence.

In other words, if both the actual brainstorming groups and individuals in the nominal groups were taught essentially similar creativity principles underlying brainstorming aimed at increasing the quantity and quality of creative ideas, it is unsurprising that both groups performed well at generating ideas - in fact the success of the individual participants in the nominal groups in generating ideas could arguably be viewed as a validation of the principles underlying brainstorming.

This is not a significant issue for Taylor's study design, as Taylor's objective was to try to isolate whether or not there were any synergistic benefits to group ideation in brainstorming compared to the same number of individuals doing individual brainstorming. Indeed, as Taylor himself asserts, his:

". . . experiment includes no evaluation of the basic rules of brain-storming - only an examination of the effects of group participation when using brainstorming. "

The fact that the individuals involved in nominal groups also utilised creativity training and principles underlying brainstorming principles, is however, a pertinent point to bear in mind when interpreting Taylor's results.

Conclusions

Taking stock, the discussion to this point has highlighted:

1. Both the individuals in the nominal groups and the brainstorming group sessions were given training in similar creativity techniques - Taylor's objective was to isolate if group dynamics make a positive difference when brainstorming
2. Taylor found that group dynamics made a negative difference, but he was using as facilitators a couple of graduate students with no stated extensive training or history in either group facilitation in general or brainstorming techniques in particular, leading a group of undergraduate students as participants. The study therefore leaves open the important question of whether issues of process loss in group facilitation process loss were adequately addressed in the study design. If the facilitation process did not facilitate effectively, then it leaves open the possibility that the negative results for brainstorming sessions that Taylor identified were a direct result of a lack of facilitation skills or brainstorming expertise on the part of the facilitators

Mongeau and Morr's 1999 paper reinforced the above observations. Mongeau and Morr concluded that:

"There are two important conclusions that should be drawn from this review. First and foremost, considerable research clearly and consistently shows that untrained, ad-hoc, face-to-face brainstorming groups are inferior to nominal groups in the production of the quantity and quality of ideas. Their inferiority increases with group size. Furthermore, electronic brainstorming groups tend to produce more ideas than either face-to-face brainstorming groups or nominal groups (whether electronic or manual). The superiority of electronic brainstorming groups increases with group size.

Second, the research performed on both face-to-face and electronic brainstorming differs in important ways from what Osborn (1957) called suspended judgment and/or brainstorming. There are many important differences between Osborn's description of the spirit, structure, and functioning of brainstorming groups and the way in which groups were formed, trained, and expected to generate ideas. In short, although considerable research has been performed on brainstorming, little of this research is a valid test of Osborn's ideas."

In order to obtain the strongest and most convincing possible results Taylor - or subsequent researchers - would have needed to demonstrate that Osborn's recommendations for brainstorming were closely followed by experienced group brainstorming facilitators (who minimise process loss) who believe they are obtaining superior results (with demonstrated commercially valued outcomes) and that still even in this context the performance of the nominal group outperforms the brainstorming groups. It is not clear that this has been established, and therefore the research results need to be examined in context.

It is however interesting that the electronic brainstorming sessions are identified in the literature as producing much better outcomes (in terms of more ideas). Perhaps this could be attributed to less process loss during a session. It would be interesting to see more research about the quality of the ideas generated during electronic brainstorming sessions.

There is one other point to note. The above studies have focused on the idea-generation activity. Brainstorming however is a process that consists of idea-generation together with deferred evaluation - subsequent activity to evaluate the ideas and select the best ones for further use. It is not clear to what extent the studies mentioned above address idea evaluation as well as idea generation.

RBA on Reflexivity in Economic Systems

"It comes down to psychology. If everybody thinks there's a crisis, then there will be a crisis. If people don't think there will be a crisis, then there won't be a crisis."

- Professor Warwick McKibben, Reserve Bank of Australia Board Member, "trying to snuff out financial panic" quoted in The Age Newspaper April 15th 2008

Al Gore Gives an Update to "An Inconvenient Truth"

At the recent 2008 TED talks, environmental campaigner Al Gore gave a 20 minute update to his powerpoint presentation "An Inconvenient Truth" and answered questions on his view of the treatment of the environment in the current US election.

The talk refuted the argument that climate change is not related to activity by presenting relevant data, and made some strong points, including

• The ice in the Arctic is predicted to completely melt in the summer within 5 years
• The US is now the only country that has not ratified the Kyoto agreement
• Just as there are three kinds of military engagement - local, regional and global - there are three kinds of environmental problems (local, regional and global) - and Global Warming is a global issue and needs to be dealt with that way
• We have the technology and capability to deal with this issue - we just need to step up and take action

Watch the video here!

Is Gladwell's "Tipping Point" Toast?

In March 2007, I posted a three part critical review here here and here of Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point.

Recently, the February 2008 issue of Fast Company Magazine recently published a great article by Clive Thompson entitled "Is the Tipping Point Toast?". The article is a fascinating and accessible adjunct to the social network theory and tipping point literature and a good continuation of discussion of the topic.

Primarily based around an interview with social network theorist Duncan Watts, the article critically examines the marketing notion of consumer "influentials" as articulated in works such as "The Influentials" aligned with Gladwell's Tipping Point argument and dating back to sociologists Katz and Lazarfield's work on Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications in the mid 1950s. The central message of Personal Influence, picked up by Gladwell, is that companies broadcast messages, which are then picked up by "opinion leaders" who then proselytised their peers. The idea is similar to the notion of "change agents" and "champions" in Roger Everett's 1962 (and later editions) sociological classic Diffusion of Innovations.

Amongst several fascinating points raised in the Fast Company article,

• Watts recreated the Milgram "Six Degrees of Separation" experiment - but instead of 160 people as the starting point with only one destination for the messages, Watts used 61,000 people online, with 18 destinations. Watts found that his experiment confirmed that "six degrees of separation" was about right - but that hubs of highly connected people didn't play a critical role. Only 5% of email messages passed through one of these "superconnectors." The remainder - 95% - moved through a path of relatively weakly connected individuals until they arrived at the target.

• Watts developed computer simulations designed around the "rules" for tipping points or a viral spread of ideas postulated in works such as the Tipping Point or The Influentials - and found that even with highly connected "influentials" being allocated quite a lot of influence, the average "viral" cascade was still far more likely to be started by an "average Joe" with normal levels of connection. The reason? Watts suggests his computer models support a common sense observation that "if society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one - and if it isn't, then almost no-one can."
  

• In a third experiment, Watts created an online music download service, and filled it with 28 songs by new unknown and upcoming bands. He then created 14,000 online participants, divided into eight groups. The first group was asked to rate the acts individually and objectively. The other eight groups were allowed to discuss each others preferences. What Watts found was that in each of the "social worlds" the top and the bottom songs were completely different - and the factors leading to these differences appeared to be the early comments by members of each group, an evaluation that for all intents or purposes might as well be considered random.
  

I think Watt's point that an idea can only readily spread and become viral if the relevant society is ready to accept it is an important point. This dovetails with the notion raised in Dan and Chip Heath's book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die that some ideas can be crafted in more compelling and communicable manners, and thus more readily be transmitted and accepted.

The central underlying point for me though is that the transmission of ideas through social systems is inherently nuanced and complicated, because social systems are complicated. There are myriad nuances, and I doubt there is ever going to be a simple diffusion of ideas model that enables effective dissemination of any idea at any time through any society or social subgrouping in a viral fashion. This, I think is a good thing. I'd rather not have Coke and Pepsi and McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken and whatever other products I might not normally choose to use being vigorously promoted through the social groups I am involved with, by trusted friends and colleagues.

But for companies that do wish to pursue the viral diffusion of ideas, perhaps hiring someone with a strong sociological or anthropological background is a good starting point for working with diffusing ideas through complicated and nuanced social systems.

Fast Company on Design Thinking

Design thinking in business is becoming increasingly mainstream. The October 2007 issue of Fast Company magazine has a terrific special feature section on design thinking, profiling the designers who have brought design thinking to the forefront of modern corporate thought.

Particularly interesting is the article on Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject. Fuseproject, founded 8 years ago, has won more International Design Excellence Awards in the past 5 years than any other design firm save the trailblazing firm Ideo - and fuseproject's staff numbers 28 compared with Ideo with more than 500. Behar views the role of design as fusing technology with humanity. As Behar describes it:

"We have one foot in the consumer's space, and one foot in our client's space, so we can act as the bridge, or the glue."

For Behar,

"The simplest definition of design is how you treat your customer. If you acknowledge their intelligence, and treat them well from an environmental, emotional, and aesthetic standpoint, you're probably doing good design."

However, by that standard, he says, few CEO's come close: They just don't know how hard it is, and what it will take on their part. There's pain in transformation, pain when you have to do things differently."

The article points out that designers such as "Butler at Coke, Hacker at J&J, Claudia Kotcha at P&G, and Jonathan Ive at Apple" are getting traction in their organizations, and getting backing from the top. In a second article, Fast Company interviews Sam Lucente, formerly from IBM and currently HP's first Vice President of Design, who talks about some of his activity that took design thinking into the heart of HP's corporate mindset.

One example Lucente gave was presenting a slide of dozens of different HP logos, each created by a different team within the company, followed by a slide of a single logo created by his team - and pointing out that when 500 million of the new logos were used consistently across the company, HP would stand to gain $50M in development and manufacturing costs. Lucente argued that equally impressive results could be achieved across the Enterprise with respect to software, product controls, packaging, enterprise systems, and even parts of it's supply chain, and went on to produce similar design outcomes for HP, for example standardising the navigation controls used on HP's products from enough to fill a 4 foot by 8 foot poster to one sleek standard navigation design.

The article noted that design thinking at the corporate level has challenges - it is one thing to gain the CEO's executive backing, but the value and practice of design thinking needs to be driven in to organizational units across the organization. In addition, design thinking needs to coordinate and drive both marketing and product development or engineering thinking.

However, the article suggests that design thinking leads to successful corporate outcomes, reporting that "a three year study of more than 40 Fortune 500 companies by research firm Peer Insight found that companies focused on customer-experience design outperformed the S&P 500 by a 10-to-1 margin from 2000 to 2005." This is a significant testimonial to the business value of design thinking.

Leadership Focus

Annette Clancy from the Interactions blog posted a nice image regarding leadership focus:

The message is self evident from the diagram - leaders should be focusing more on the high level direction rather than operational questions.

If I was doing the diagram myself, I think I'd include the 'what' higher up in the diagram, in the leader's section - leaders need to decide 'what' business the organization is in, 'what' the focus is, and 'what' the ground rules and incentive structures are. When it comes to the specifics, suitably qualified, trained and responsible people on the coalface should be able to decide for themselves 'what' needs to be done to achieve the vision or strategy set out by leadership - and 'how' to do it.

The Art of Persuasion: Getting Buy-In For Your Ideas

A recent post Selling Your Ideas to the Entire Organization, One Person at a Time by Mahesh M Piddshetti on the Hyper Passionate Entrepreneurs blog, contained an extremely stimulating review of the book The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas.

The book is about the art of persuasion: how to get your ideas heard and adopted for the benefit of all concerned.

The review is well worth a read, and I'm looking forward to getting hold of the book.