Brainstorms and Headaches

Where I wanted to be when brainstorming

How many of you have participated in so many brainstorming sessions that it makes your head spin? 

Go ahead, raise your hands.  You won't be alone.  Now, how many of you have thought those sessions were a colossal waste of time and little more than a pooling of shared ignorance?  Come on, you introverts, you know who you are.  

All right, I'll go first...

And, of course, you were correct.  I am embarrassed to say this out loud, since in my various facilitative guises I have led more brainstorming sessions than I care to remember.  Organizational psychologists have known for over fifty years that such sessions tend to produce lower quality ideas and fewer of them besides.  We often do better generating and developing our own ideas.

So why is brainstorming so popular and so revered?  Susan Cain notes that it is a wonderful tool for strengthening the social glue of a group (Quiet, page 89).  If that's the goal of a brainstorming exercise, then it will be a success--at least for all the extroverts who get energy from such communal bonding experiences.  And it's usually the extroverts who write the reports.  But if the goal is producing a large volume of quality ideas, then such processes are usually dismal failures.

Why is that that?  Cain points to three psychological explanations for such failures:

• social loafing: some group members will sit as freeloaders in the process;
• production blocking: only one person can talk at a time while the others listen.  Thus the process works by addition rather logarithmically;
• evaluation apprehension: we fear looking stupid in front of others.

The third explanation, Cain notes, runs so deep that it is difficult to defeat.  One of the results of this apprehension is the "false consensus" effect.  Those who speak first, loudly and with conviction will have an inordinate impact on the outcome.  Cain reminds us of the conformity experiment performed by Solomon Asch and associates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments).  

The assertive extroverts can take a brainstorming process any direction they wish while the introverts sit and steam.  The anxious introverts will wonder if their noisy colleagues are in fact correct.  The calm introverts will simply be irritated because there is no room for introspective processing.  The false consensus effect will therefore reduce the number of quality ideas, increase the underlying tension in the group and disenfranchise the quiet group members.

So, what's a facilitator to do?  I have adjusted my practice to always make room first of all for the introverts.  For example, before we begin an idea-generating conversation, I ask participants to write down--without discussion--any and all ideas they can come up with individually.  I assure them that they only need share aloud the ones they want to share.  However, I will include in the written summary of the process any and all ideas shared aloud or in writing.  That begins to open the door for the less verbal in the group.

If it is a process that needs to produce a result at the meeting, I distribute pads of sticky notes.  I ask participants to write each idea on a separate slip of paper.  If you are familiar with the "Great Permission" process, you will recognize this tactic.  Then I ask the participants to stick their ideas up on the wall.  After that, group members can spend some time collating the ideas into categories or relationships of some kind.  There's a bit of anonymity in this process and some safety in numbers.  In addition, the sheer volume of ideas typically quadruples compared to traditional brainstorming sessions.

We need floods of wisdom in our processes not storms in the brain.  Introverts of the world arise! Well, that's asking too much.  But at least we can feel a little less defective in the extroverted mayhem of our daily life.