Is the brainstorming that has always been highly respected by designers really an artifact for generating good ideas? Today’s translation, through a number of scientific comparative studies, has found a method that is more efficient than brainstorming and can generate more good ideas. It is definitely a savior of inspiration exhausted cancer. Let’s collect it together!
Research shows that brainstorming generates fewer good ideas than people think independently.
The good news is that there are more effective ways of working in teams.
If you are an office worker, you may have been dragged into a brainstorming meeting by your boss or colleagues in all likelihood. Brainstorm, chasing its original intention should be a killer that generates good ideas. The company is generally keen to refine the collective creativity of the team through this form of cooperation. But as everyone knows, it turns out that brainstorming is actually a terrible technique—in fact, people generate less attention during brainstorming than when they think independently.
Fortunately, there is a better way to make teamwork more efficient-brain writing (Brainwriting, you can understand that it is based on pen and paper, and there is less brainstorming between a group of people). In a new research report, the institute tested various versions of this method, trying to summarize what motivates people to generate better ideas.
Why is brainstorm useless?
The traditional brain storm was invented by Alex F. Osborn half a century ago and then invaded the American office. After observing such a phenomenon, psychologists can’t help but start to wonder: Does brainstorming really work? After countless research projects, they came up with this answer: No at all. Countless studies have found that people in the process of independent thinking can often produce more good ideas than a group of people brainstorming together.
This conclusion surprised many people. After all, many studies have proved that group interaction allows members to develop each other’s ideas and stimulate each other’s creativity. So where are the flaws of the brainstorm? Bear the brunt of the brain storm. Generally speaking, only one person is speaking at the same time, which means that one or two people can easily dominate the entire brain storm. When one person is sharing his thoughts, other people may forget the idea they just thought of, or the whole group may not get out because of a person’s speech and the thinking is limited by that one idea.
Paul Paulus (Professor of Psychology, University of Texas at Arlington) pointed out:
Brain storm is a complicated process, during which members must listen, think, supplement, cooperate, and deduct. From the perspective of psychological activities, it is an extremely cumbersome behavior, and people are not able to perform well under such conditions. In the end, the role of brain violence and its original meaning are just counter-intuitive.
What replaces the brain storm?
As scientists discovered that brainstorms did not actually work, they immediately began to look for other ways of thinking that were truly beneficial to the collective. As stated by Art Markman, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin,
It’s not that there is something wrong with a group of people working together, but the method Osborn proposed is too lame.
In the past two decades, the research institute has discovered that some methods of collective creation can observe that groups perform better than individuals. One of the more prominent is Brainwriting. In fact, brain writing is a variant form of brain violence, but the members will write their ideas on paper instead of blurting them out in the process. While recording their own ideas, the members spread these notes in the group, read each other’s thoughts, and continued to write down their new ideas below. This kind of cooperation maintains the constructiveness of group interactions and avoids the traps that may be caught in verbal and brainstorming.
The scientific basis for brain writing
Although many scholars have studied brain writing, no one has actually experimented and recorded the effectiveness of this method in an office environment in the past. Therefore, Paul Paulus’s recent research in Human Factors and Ergonomics Society brought this thinking tool to a real office, in collaboration with employees of a top 20 high-tech company in the world. Paulus is not only interested in whether brain writing has practical utility, he wants to know what methods or tools can maximize the creative output of brain writing.
Therefore, the research team organized 57 research objects including engineers and computer scientists and grouped them. In an experiment, they tried to get some participants to write in small groups for a problem first, and then enter the independent brain storm. The rest of the participants performed independent brainstorms first, and then group brain writing. After such an experiment, Paulus can test the effects of independent thinking and group brain writing, as well as the effect of sequence and combination on the final result.
In the end, the research team found that when there are only two choices, brain writing and independent thinking, they may perform better in the team. In the experiment, brain writing participants received an average of 37% more outstanding ideas than independent thinking participants. The team also found that the group of brain writing first and then independent brainstorming produces good ideas that are more than the group of independent brainstorming before brain writing.
Paulus noted:
We found that when people jump from team interaction and communication to their own independent thinking, their creativity will expand by leaps and bounds, and this is often the situation where the best ideas are generated.
Paulus also mentioned that independent thinking must be carried out quickly after the team’s brain is written.
If you take a long time to come back to this problem, often the brain activity stimulated by the team interaction disappears.
In the second phase of the experiment with the same 57 employees, Paulus’s team tried asynchronous brain writing, which means switching between group brain writing and independent thinking multiple times. In this phase of the experiment, some groups were restricted from switching back and forth between the two ways of thinking, while other groups switched their way of thinking every three minutes. The research team found that the production efficiency of asynchronous brain writing is about 0.5 pips per minute, while the production efficiency of ordinary brain writing is 0.29 per minute.
Paulus:
When you have only one person, you cannot get the ideas of other people. And when you are in a group, you may spend more time thinking about other people’s ideas, rather than your own. Therefore, if you can extract the respective benefits from these two working conditions, your gains will be considerable.
Note: About the actual value of brain writing
In view of the fact that the team led by Paulus conducted a small number of experiments, many of the data are far from being representative. (Except for the phase of asynchronous brain writing) However, according to the Paulus team, such a sampling scale is actually a common practice for experiments carried out in the workplace, because this kind of research project has a certain degree of difficulty in obtaining the cooperation of enterprises.
Paulus’s research results are still an important contribution to the academic community and industry, at least they have successfully confirmed the benefits of brain writing in a real office environment. “The important thing is that this experiment is a real company, with real employees, to generate real ideas for real cases.” Paulus said, “From this perspective, the significance of this research is still significant. “Leigh Thompson, a management professor at Northwestern University (not involved in this experiment), also agreed with Paulus: “Their results give us greater confidence in the data collected in the experimental control environment.”
In any case, this report still shows that you and your colleagues may have to abandon the usual brain storm patterns and start to try brain writing or consider other ways of cooperation. Or at least as Paulus said: “Good things don’t happen just because you bring a group of people together. You still have to use reasonable methods of cooperation.”
