That's fascinating ... can you provide references for that research? We've found the careful controlling of criticism to be invaluable in getting ideas up front quickly so they can then be dissected, mutated, co-evolved, and their best points combined.
Iterating quickly and ejecting bad ideas quickly has its place, yes, but not always. I'd be interested to see the underlying context for your statement here.
This doesn't support the point but the conversation reminded me about something I read a while ago that is related. Maybe you will find it interesting.
The researchers found that a problem with brainstorming is the verbal component - due to social factors and limited oral and aural bandwidth, less ideas get shared, and people forget what they were about to say.
They decided 'brainwriting' is more effective, particularly 'asynchronous brainwriting' which alternates between writing your own ideas in a group, then reviewing others' ideas. This method would support want you want - getting all the ideas out quickly, because people are less likely to hold back, then iterating on them.
That's from the paper? I wasn't sure from the article - they mentioned 50+ individuals but then said they had various conditions (group first or individual first) so I assumed they ran them in different groups. I'll agree a single group of fifty is ridiculous - 10 would be pushing it for me. You'll probably get 2 people posturing/dominating in most places.
My bad. I just mis-read the article. Just now I went and downloaded the paper, and I see no group size specified, nor indeed any details of the procedure they followed. That might just be the house style of the journal. However, they mention that models predict that creativity increase with the size of the group (to a point). But they don't specify this point.
The recommendations they draw are:
1. Combining group and solitary brainstorming
2. Having group brainstormers interact by writing instead of speaking (“brainwriting”)
3. Using networked computers on which individuals type their ideas and read the ideas of others (electronic brainstorming)
They nicely give some recommended readings:
- Paulus, P.B., & Nijstad, B.A. (Eds.). (in press). Group creativity. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Brown, V., Tumeo, M., Larey, T.S., & Paulus, P.B. (1998). Modeling cognitive interactions during group brainstorming. Small Group Research, 29, 495–526.
Many institutional brainstorming sessions I have attended are a complete waste of time, for all the obvious reasons (mostly ego-dominance and poor leadership). This the paper refers to as 'production blocking'. However, I find that managed correctly, there are few better ways to introduce diversity of thought into a process.
Well the lack of numbers is a bit disappointing. I admit I'm not interested enough to really dig in but I do find the results interesting. And they did shoot down the previous advice I was given, which is to have everyone set aside time to write down some ideas before the meeting. It seems the presence of the group itself is a strong motivating factor.
That may be, for genuinely bad ideas, but that is not really the issue here, which is the summary dismissal of something without due consideration, and, more generally, the predisposition to act that way.
I have seen good things dismissed because the critic has some arbitrary standards of style, or is disinclined to make an effort to understand the implementation, or has failed to learn enough about the problem domain to understand all the complications, or wants to rewrite from scratch because "I'm a software engineer, not a maintainer", or "not invented here", or to lower expectations, or to intimidate and dominate... To be fair, at some time or other I have been guilty of most of these things.
I suspect that college sometimes gives people the mistaken impression that analysis and critical thinking (and being smart) is all about picking apart someone else's thoughts, but it takes more than that to create something worthwhile.
Creativity is a process. The function of a brainstorm is to initiate that process with open-ended thinking. Further into the process, more closure is required.
