whatever happened to brainstorming

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THOMAS J. BOUCHARD Whatever Happened to Brainstorming* Brainstorming as a group form of problem solving was de- veloped by Alex Osborn in the late 1930s and widely pub- licized in his book, Applied Imagination (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1953 - third revised edition now in print). The basic idea behind brainstorming is the deferment of criti- cal judgment and the spontaneous presentation to the group of any ideas that occur to any person in the group. The pro- cedure is used to facilitate divergent thinking and the pro- duction of many ideas. It is not used to produce convergent thinking, nor is it the answer to a problem that has a single solution. Dr. Osborn had four basic rules for brainstorming: Criticism is ruled out - adverse judgment of ideas must be withheld. No one should criticize anyone else's ideas. Free wheeling is welcome- the wilder the idea the better. It is easier to tame down than to think up ideas. Don't be afraid to say anything that comes into your mind - the farther out the idea the better. This complete freedom stimu- lates more and better ideas. • Quantity is wanted - the greater the number of ideas, the more likelihood of winners. Come up with as many as you can. Try combination and improvement. In addition to con- tributing ideas of your own, suggest how ideas of others can be turned into better ideas, or how two or more ideas can be joined into still a better idea. "Reprinted with permission from the August 2, 1971 issue of In- dustry Week. Copyright, Penton Publishing Co., Cleoeland, Ohio. 182 Volume 5 Number 3 Third Quarter 1971

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Page 1: Whatever Happened to Brainstorming

THOMAS J. BOUCHARD

Whatever Happenedto Brainstorming*

Brainstorming as a group form of problem solving was de­veloped by Alex Osborn in the late 1930s and widely pub­licized in his book, Applied Imagination (Charles Scribner'sSons, New York, 1953 - third revised edition now in print).The basic idea behind brainstorming is the deferment of criti­cal judgment and the spontaneous presentation to the groupof any ideas that occur to any person in the group. The pro­cedure is used to facilitate divergent thinking and the pro­duction of many ideas. It is not used to produce convergentthinking, nor is it the answer to a problem that has a singlesolution.

Dr. Osborn had four basic rules for brainstorming:• Criticism is ruled out - adverse judgment of ideas mustbe withheld. No one should criticize anyone else's ideas.• Free wheeling is welcome- the wilder the idea the better.It is easier to tame down than to think up ideas. Don't beafraid to say anything that comes into your mind - thefarther out the idea the better. This complete freedom stimu­lates more and better ideas.• Quantity is wanted - the greater the number of ideas, themore likelihood of winners. Come up with as many as youcan.• Try combination and improvement. In addition to con­tributing ideas of your own, suggest how ideas of others canbe turned into better ideas, or how two or more ideas canbe joined into still a better idea.

"Reprinted with permission from the August 2, 1971 issue of In­dustry Week. Copyright, Penton Publishing Co., Cleoeland, Ohio.

182 Volume 5 Number3 Third Quarter 1971

Page 2: Whatever Happened to Brainstorming

DECLINE ANDFALL OF BRAIN­

STORMING

WHERE ITWORKS BEST

The Journal o' C....tlv. Behavior

There is a free play of fantasy and imagination. Creativethinking, even about a relatively specific or well defined prob­lem, is thought to always involve a decrease in critical judg­ment and a rather primitive form of associative thinking. Ingroups, this process is supposedly helped along because mem­bers provide each other with cues - continually feeding as­sociations and generating more and better ideas.Brainstorming gained considerable attention throughout the1950's and became a firmly entrenched idea. In 1958, how­ever, a report of an experimental test that measured the ef­fectiveness of the procedure was published in a widely readprofessional journal. The experiment, titled "Does group par­ticipation when using brainstorming facilitate or inhibit crea­tive thinking?" was conducted by Prof. Donald Taylor andhis colleagues at Yale University. It demonstrated that sepa­rate individuals alone could solve problems better thangroups could brainstorm. What Prof. Taylor did was to com­pare the number of unique ideas generated by four in­dividuals - who worked alone - with the performance of agroup.

These results were widely cited, and enthusiasm for brain­storming waned. In.1963, Prof. Marvin Dunnette and his col­leagues at the University of Minnesota dampened enthusiasmfor the procedure even further by repeating and improvingon the Taylor experiment; the people involved in the Min­nesota experiment were research scientists and advertisingpersonnel at 3M Co., 5t. Paul. This experiment has been re­peated by me and by other researchers with a variety ofgroup sizes. We all found the same results.But these results have been badly misinterpreted. For onething, they do not disprove the effectiveness of brainstorm­ing as a group problem-solving method. They simply showthat individual creativeness is better than group brainstorm­ing under the conditions imposed by these studies. There arestill conditions under which group procedures or some com­bination of group and individual procedures are necessary:when the information needed for solving the problem isscattered among different people. Another important con­sideration is that in implementation as opposed to genera­tion of solutions, the acceptance of a decision by the in­dividuals involved is often as important as the quality of thedecision.

5ince we already know that group decisions are generallybetter accepted than decisions which are handed down au­thoritatively, the group procedure is often more desirable. A

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Page 3: Whatever Happened to Brainstorming

Whatever Happened to Brainstorming

group decision of somewhat lower quality may be moredesirable than a "high quality" one issued by an individual,because the group decision may be implemented morequickly and with minimal difficulty. A product or decision ofthis sort, which may not be technically the best, is said "tosuffice." So, while groups may not optimize, they can suf­fice, and this outcome may be more desirable in the longrun.

The question, "Is group brainstorming superior to themore traditional procedures of critical group problem solv­ing?" still remained. Using the same problems as Prof. Taylorand Prof. Dunnette, I was able to show that brainstormingwas significantly better.

There were still some unanswered questions. My owngroups did not strike me as very creative; they made veryineffective use of their time and resources. I suspect thesame was also true of Prof. Taylor's groups because both ofus obtained nearly identical scores on the three commonproblems we used. In spite of instructions, participants sim­ply weren't as spontaneous as they might have been.

Some obvious reasons immediately suggested themselves.Most of the groups studied were made up of individualswho did not know each other (ad hoc groups) and evenwhen they did, as in Prof. Dunnette's and others' experi­ments, they had not had any significant amount of practiceworking together. There was also the factor of motivation.Real groups in applied settings are highly motivated becausethere is a real payoff for successful performance. This couldlead to more effective management of the group's time andresources. A third consideration, ignored in most studies,was individual differences. Any manager knows that noteveryone will work well in group situations. Yet these experi­ments threw people together at random.

WHAT IT TAKES To find out how important motivation, training, and com­petition are,"] conducted an experiment designed to examineeach factor alone, and in combination with all other factors.It took eight types of groups to include all of the possibili­ties, asshown in the group organization chart

Groups' were either trained (worked together on a va­riety of problems prior to working on the final task) orthey were untrained (only worked on the final task). Train­ing was not explicitly designed to enhance skill in problemsolving, but it gave people some practice and allowed them toget to know each other; they didn't go into the problem cold.Motivation was manipulated through having pairs of groups

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Page 4: Whatever Happened to Brainstorming

FIGURE I

The Journal of Creallve lrehavlor

Method of forming the eight different types of groups usedto study the effects of motivation, training interpersonal ef­fectiveness, and their combinations on brainstorming. Whengroups are formed in this manner there are statistical tech­niques available for analyzing the results. (HIGH, i.e. -- highinterpersonal effectiveness; LOW, i.e. = low interpersonal ef­fectiveness.)

LOW MOTIVATION-- ~ -TRAINED NOTTRAINED- .A

HIGH LOW HIGH LOWI.e. I••• I.e. I•••

~ ~ I~

\ ~GROUP GROUP GROUP GROUP

1 2 3 4

HIGH MOTIVATION-- ............... -TRAINED NOTTRAINED..... ~

HIGH LOW HIGH LOWI.•. I.e. i.e. I.e.

~ ~ ~ , ~ ,GROUP GROUP GROUP GROUP

5 6 7 8

compete against each other for a money prize. Two types ofgroups were studied; high interpersonal effectiveness andlow interpersonal effectiveness, as determined by personalitytest scores.

Rather than simply allow the groups to interact in an un­checked manner, I required them to participate in a sequen­tial manner. Each individual had to speak in sequence andgive up his tum and say, "Pass," if he had no ideas to con­tribute on that time around.

Results confirmed a hard fact of life - that groups arecomplicated. There were no major effects due to motivationalone, nor to training alone, nor just to group composition.The low interpersonal effectiveness groups (2, 4, 6, 8) didmoderately well with their tasks regardless of whether theywere motivated or trained or not. They simply did their bestand apparently reached the limit of their abilities in the givensituation.

The high interpersonal effectiveness group without train­ing and motivation did poorly. Members apparently needed areason to perform, and the intrinsic interest of the experi­ment (which is the only motivator in most experimental

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Whatever Happened to Bralnltormlng

studies) was not enough to make them perform, even at thelevel of low interpersonal effectiveness groups.

High interpersonal effectiveness groups - trained but notmotivated (Group I), or motivated but not trained (Group7), performed much better than the comparably treated lowinterpersonal effectiveness groups. Surprisingly, motivationand training did not add up or summate. Groups that wereboth trained and motivated (5) did as poorly as groups thathad neither of the two treatments (3). The reason probablywas that they had trained under low motivation conditions,and the introduction of the high reward resulted in a dis­ruption of their normally skilled performance during the test.

Effective group performance is no different from any otherkind of skilled performance. We had violated the old rulethat says the circumstances of training should be as similaras possible to the circumstances of performance. I believe(but have not proved) that training and motivation will beadditive if training occurs under high motivation conditions.On the other hand, I now know it is possible to preselecteffective group members on the basis of personality, butsuch groups are extremely sensitive to experimental manipu­lation (and perhaps to other kinds of events), and theirperformance will vary greatly depending upon the circum­stances.

Fortunately, this complex set of findings is not restricted tothis particular experiment. Various attempts to train and pre­select brainstorming group members have yielded similar re­sults. You can't train just anyone, or put just anyone in agroup context, and expect good results. This finding shouldcome as no surprise to experienced managers. Effective groupsare both rare and very delicate.

To compare the effectiveness of our groups' procedure(which differed somewhat from previous research in that itrequired sequencing rather than a free situation) to nominalgroups, I had a number of individuals work on the sametasks for the same amount of time. These individuals unfor­tunately were all low on interpersonal effectiveness - so thefollowing comparisons are with low interpersonal effective­ness groups. I found as in all previous studies that the sum ofindividual contributions J"ias slightly and significantly su­perior to the groups', but the difference was far less than inprevious studies.

One of the problems used in my work had been used inprevious studies. So it was possible to compare the per­formance of our groups (those that had not been highly mo-

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Page 6: Whatever Happened to Brainstorming

The Journal of Cr.atlve Behavior

tivated) with the results produced by previous groups andindividuals. The results were spectacular. Our groups pro­duced 87.5% more ideas than the average score for all pre­vious groups that had worked on that problem and gen­erated exactly the same performance as the average score ofall collections of individuals that worked on the task. Simplyadding the sequencing procedure to typical brainstorming in­structions brings group performance up to the level of in­dividual performance.

Why does group sequencing procedure have such a pro­found effect?• The procedure makes it difficult for anyone individual todominate the discussion (often with trivia).• It forces the discussion to stay directly on the problem,and in such a way that the group's thought processes arechanneled along relevant lines.• It promotes and forces greater involvement by all members.

It does not allow, or at least makes it more difficult forone member to take the role of expert and inhibit the per­formance of other members.

The extremely inhibiting effect of the presence of an "ex­pert" has been dramatically demonstrated in a recent study,and this factor is particularly important. There should be asfew status differences as possible between members of aproblem solving group.

NEW TRICKS Surprisingly, most of the outcomes listed above are goals ofthe so-called nonevaluative atmosphere which the unstruc­tured brainstorming procedure is supposed to achieve. Mostgroup workers, such as chairmen of committees, know thatsuch an atmosphere is extremely difficult to create. For prac­tical purposes a "procedural fix" or "operational strategy" isnecessary in order to bypass the difficulty. The sequencingprocedure, simple as it may seem, is one such "fix."

My own success with the procedure has led me to searchfor others. The best candidates were the. subprocesses thatcomprise the synectics procedure developed by William Gor­don of Synectics Inc., Cambridge, Mass. Although synecticsis Widely used in industry, it has not been studied experi­mentally. The synectics process involves two complementaryprocedures: making the strange familiar; and making the fa­miliar strange. Making the strange familiar simply meansdeveloping an understanding of the problem. Once this isaccomplished, the problem solver works at transforming itand making it strange - again. Four procedures or opera-

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Page 7: Whatever Happened to Brainstorming

PERSONAL ANALOGYEVALUATED

Whatever Happened to Braln8tormlng

tional mechanisms accomplish this end: personal analogy, di­rect analogy, symbolic analogy, and fantasy analogy.

Personal analogy requires psychological identification withessential components of the problem. If the problem is find­ing a new way to open a particular kind of container, eachmember of the group in turn plays the role of the container(bottle, box, can) and the remaining members question himabout the best way to get in.

The advice, "Put yourself in his place." is widely givenwhen one wants to generate empathy or some understandingof the circumstances surrounding another person. In spite ofthis widespread usage in the everyday social world, there isalmost none in the problem solving world.

Direct analogy requires looking for analogous processes ina different domain than the one being worked on. An en­gineer working on. a mechanical device might for exampleexamine how biological organisms solve similar problems.

Symbolic analogy requires the use of poetic images andsymbolic representations.

Fantasy analogy requires the use of wish fulfillment; theproblem solver attempts (as he does in his dreams) to ig­nore all the fundamental laws that govern the universe. Forexample, he might assume that the speed of light can bevaried or that gravity can be turned on and off.Our work has focused on personal analogy, primarily becauseit can be manipulated experimentally. We wanted to evaluatethe effectiveness of personal analogy as an operational mech­anism. 50, we compared the performance of brainstorminggroups who followed Mr. Osborn's instructions and our se­quencing procedure with groups who had been given identi­cal instructions and had also been told to identify with thetask. The additional identification instructions were verysimple:

"Each of you in turn gets to play a central part of theproblem while the group works on it. For example, if theproblem were, 'Think up as many names as you can for anew spray deodorant,' one of you would get up on the table,sit down, close your eyes and play the part of the deodorant.The amount of time each of you will play the role or part ofthe problem will vary from task to task and will be indi­cated on your instruction sheets. The procedure here is sim­ple. Ideas should be contributed in sequence. Note that eachof your instruction sheets is numbered. Subject No.1 shouldbegin, followed by subject No.2, etc. This includes the per­son who is playing the part of the problem object. Don't let

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Page 8: Whatever Happened to Brainstorming

REASON ISNOT CLEAR

The Journal of Creative Behavior

this task throw you. An easy way to conceptualize it is toimagine that you are doing an animated commercial fortelevision."

Results were striking. The groups worked on nine dif­ferent tasks. The groups that used the personal analogy pro­cedure outperformed the brainstorming groups on all ninetasks and the differences were significant for four of the ninetasks.It seems clear that as a group problem solving procedure thepersonal analogy approach can add a great deal to brain­storming groups, but it is not clear why the personal analogygroups are better. It may be that the physical activity re­quired involves the participants to a greater extent. Any pro­cedure which is novel or different might have similar results.In my opinion, the personal analogy procedure is superiori

it directs thought along relevant, though unusual channels.Brainstorming is an essentially free associative type of proc­ess with no rules for directing thought.

It is still a question whether individuals can make use ofpersonal analogy and other synectics procedures as effec­tivelyas they do brainstorming procedures. We suspect fromsome preliminary work that groups will benefit far morefrom synectics than individuals will; that we now have ac­cess to a procedure which will make groups essentially moreproductive than individuals.

Personal analogy also appears to be an effective opera­tional strategy or procedural fix that can be added to se­quencing and used to bypass a difficult problem: generatingthat elusive creative atmosphere or set of special circum­stances that enables one to be creative in groups.

Both the sequencing procedure and the personal analogyprocedure have some very important applied characteristics.They are simple, understandable, fun, require very littletraining, and do not require any special equipment.

Thomas J. Bouchard, Ir., Associate Professor, Department of Psychol­ogy.Address: University of Minnesota, Elliott Hall, Minneapolis, Minne­sota 55455.

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