Taylor Clarke Blog

Brazilian Brainstorming by Laurence Clarke, Managing Director

February 18th, 2008

Brainstorming has been with us since Alex Osborne coined the phrase in the 50’s.  So it really amazes me that we so rarely use it properly.

Years ago when running an Advertising Agency, I came across the problem which I’m sure Alex Osborne had when he thought up brainstorming (he also ran an Advertising Agency).  Our creative team just could not come up with any ideas let alone decent ones.  We tried scanning magazines and books for inspiration and whilst this often worked, the ideas were often flat and unimaginative.  Eventually we tried real brainstorming and the results were impressive.  We went for quantity rather than quality and suspended judgement until we had exhausted our creative juices.  It was great fun and many ideas came as a result of other’s crazy ideas.  In fact, so fruitful were the crazy ideas at stimulating new trains of thought, that I actively encourage people to come up with crazy ideas and then we try and generate more practical ones from them.

 Believing that I now knew how to brainstorm, I used it with many groups with pretty good results.  However two groups in particular made me review this.  After we had generated about twelve ideas for a particular problem the first of these groups had, they completely dried up.  No amount of encouragement from me seemed to re-ignite them.  In my frustration with the lack of ideas, I demanded that they each take a piece of paper and write down a further four ideas.  To my great surprise all ten in the group started writing.  Indeed, even those who had not contributed any ideas were now busily writing away.  We generated a further 38 ideas and on trying this “silent brainstorming” again, we were able to increase this to in excess of 60.  On analysing this, I felt that there were four things at play:

-  By writing things down people were accessing a different part of their brains and hence new ideas.

-  People get frozen out in standard brainstorming such that they simply can’t think of any more ideas.

-  Some social loafing was going on where some people were quite happy to let others do the work.

-  Some simply felt their ideas were not good enough or were too embarrassed with their ideas to shout them out.

Since then, I have developed this by using Post-it Notes, where each person in the group is given a pad of Post-its and asked to generate as many ideas as possible, one per Post-it (this is now a popular technique with the big change consultancies).  They are then asked to put their Post-its up randomly on a board or flipchart.  The next stage is to cluster these into similar ideas or themes and choose the solutions that they are going to pursue.  A refinement of this is to have a normal Brainstorm first and then do the silent version.  Then you get the best of both worlds.

So what went wrong with my second group?  They were using the Post-it process but started to discuss their ideas since a couple felt that the problem as stated had no solution.  This is where the rot set in.  They now discussed each idea in turn and their critical faculties were going at full tilt.  By the end of the session the other group in the room had generated loads of ideas and refined over 10 good ideas and were eager to get started with implementing them.  My second group were demoralised and a little embarrassed when they presented their findings of 2 rather prosaic options.

The second group however were only doing what most groups in my experience do when faced with a problem.  They get bogged down in coming up with good solutions from the onset thereby stifling the creativity of proper free flowing brainstorming.  Also the group had fallen into what I call evaluative thinking where each idea is discussed in detail and immediately evaluated.  Most good solutions are discarded because of some small flaw rather than taken as good and ways round the weaknesses found.  When you are truly brainstorming you evaluate at the end and move in to what I call comparative thinking whereby ideas are compared with each other to find the best ones regardless of their weaknesses.  This approach promotes the choosing of good ideas despite your reservations.  You can then work on finding ways round your reservations and in the process greatly improve the solution.  This last process of listening reservations and finding ways round them is one of the most powerful I’ve ever used with groups and is great for resolving differing viewpoints as well as improving particular ideas.

So the moral of the story is, if you want teams to generate lots of good ideas and be motivated to action them, make sure you really brainstorm and not just discuss possible solutions.

(We brainstormed the title for this article, lots of ideas, but Brazilian just sounded good.  A prize for anyone who can work out what our logic was in using it!!)

Entry Filed under: