I am immediately suspicious of anyone who likes brainstorms. I feel like I’m in a pretty safe space to profess this, seeing as you’ve chosen to read an article entitled Who else hates brainstorms? Hopefully we’re on the same page.
There is a very specific kind of pain associated with seeing the invite for a brainstorm drop into your inbox of a morning. I can think of nothing worse than sitting awkwardly around a table ‘thinking out loud’. Thinking is not meant to be done out loud. That’s called speaking.
Attending a brainstorm ‘cold’ will inevitably lead to me sitting in silence, not contributing anything of worth, and silently panicking about what everyone else is thinking of me. Or working out at which point I can slot in the ten words I’ve been wanting to say since the start of the meeting, meaning I haven’t listened to a word anyone else had said.
Of course, my introvert status might have something to do with this. I’ve seen super-confident creative directors and strategic heads pop into a brainstorm, say something chillingly brilliant and then stride out having ‘solved’ the problem. But I clearly missed that gene. I need quiet alone time to come up with anything half decent, let alone chillingly brilliant.
And for once, it seems my thoughts and feelings are backed up with actual science, which is awfully pleasing. My research took me back to the origin of the brainstorm. It was coined in 1942 by legendary advertising man Alex Osborn (also known as ‘the real Don Draper’) who was keen to maximise the number of ideas had by his employees.
The method caught on, and here we are nearly eighty years later, still storming around with these brains of ours, hunched around tables in awkward huddles and knocking down office walls in favour of communal group seating.
But have we actually paused to consider whether the method is working? Well, quite a few very intelligent people have, actually. There are mountains of research from the 1960s onwards consistently showing that levels of creativity and productivity are significantly lower in brainstorms than they are in individual work. But it seems we’ve chosen to ignore it.
Organisational psychologist Adrian Furnham writes: “The evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”
Studies have also shown that performance gets worse as group size increases. So, whilst a pair of workers collaborating may be OK, the idea of big teams sitting around desks and thinking as a group is rarely a successful or productive strategy.
There are a few different reasons for this, according to psychologists. There’s social loafing (I adore this expression and plan to weave it into my daily vocabulary) which means some members of the group sit back and don’t participate. Theres’s production blocking, meaning only one person can talk or create at a time. And, lastly, there’s evaluation apprehension, meaning we hold back in case others don’t like our ideas. So far, so perfectly sensical. These are all things we’ve experienced in a brainstorm.
But this is where it gets a bit terrifying. In Susan Cain’s fascinating book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking she cites some chilling research. A 2005 study by Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Burns asked volunteers to play a simple game identifying 3D shapes. When playing the game alone, volunteers got the answers wrong only 13.8 per cent of the time. But when they played within a group with planted actors unanimously giving wrong answers, this jumped to 41%. Brain scans showed that it wasn’t a matter of the participants feeling pressured to give the same answer or feeling swayed. Their perception of the problem actually subconsciously changed – and they had no idea it was even happening.
As Cain says; ‘Groups are like mind-altering substances. If the group thinks the answer is A, you’re much more likely to believe that A is correct too. Most of Bern’s volunteers reported having gone along with the group because “they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer.” They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.’
So basically, a brainstorm is the workplace equivalent of a load of people on acid hugging each other and telling everyone how amazing they are. Seems a tad inappropriate in Meeting Room 3 and, despite the immediate high, definitely not hugely productive. Try telling your boss that the next time one falls into your work diary.
Bad ideas get taken forward because everyone gets a bit overexcited and genuinely thinks they’re great. But this isn’t the worst of it. In brain scans of the few who managed to stand up against the peer pressure, the amygdala – the ancient, primitive part of our brain – was highly activated, meaning a strong, unpleasant fear of rejection was occurring. This means we have to fight doubly hard in a group setting to stay true to our beliefs.
Cain takes this beyond the humble brainstorm, rightly pointing out that this could have implications in society as a whole.
‘Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.’
Suddenly it’s all getting bigger than that team huddle around the breakfast table.
However, there is an exception. According to Cain: “Groups brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better than individuals but, research shows, the larger the group, the better it performs. The same is true of academic research – professors who work together electronically, from different physical locations, tend to produce research that is more influential than those either working alone or collaborating face-to-face.’
It seems we’ve mistaken the celebrated success of shared thinking and collaboration via technology as a sign that face-to-face group working is the way forward at the expense of quiet, solo creativity and thinking time.
A brainstorm on how to eradicate the brainstorm, anyone?
