by Artwell Nwaila (@artwelln) The creative world lives for group brainstorming; once a big brief comes in, the whole team is called in to one room to bounce ideas around. This is probably true as the practice was created by an ad executive in the 1940s. For me, this is the wrong way to harvest fresh ideas and here is why.
Before I continue this post, I’d like to make it clear that I’m in no way implying that group brainstorming doesn’t work. I’m merely sharing my personal beliefs and experiences with regards to the practice. So please don’t send any assassins my way.
Extravert/Introvert
The dominance of the extraverts more than often impairs the ideas-generation of everyone else in the room. Introverts find no comfort in public sharing and therefore withhold ideas. I am the latter.
Anchoring
Every time someone says something, your mind automatically follows that train of thought. This process is called anchoring.
“Early ideas tend to have disproportionate influence over the rest of the conversation,” explains a professor at Kellogg, Loran Nordgren, in a Fastcompany article. The problem here is that brainstorming favors the first ideas and does not open gates for other routes.
Time-consuming
The more people there are in a brainstorm, the longer the session — the longer the brainstorm, the higher the chances of settling for blunt ideas. Brainstorming feels like productivity in action, when in reality a few people are sharing and the rest are praying the session ends soon.
Muted creativity
The idea behind brainstorming is that a group of people gather and ideas burst from every corner. Cognitive psychologist Tony McCaffrey writes in the Harvard Business Review says that brainstorming makes people less creative than when they work alone. What happens is that everyone is distracted by the clutter and no valuable thinking happens in the session.
Richard Wiseman supports this sentiment in his book, 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot: “People are more creative away from the crowd. For 70 years, people have been using brainstorming to stifle — not stimulate —their creative juices.”
Leadership
Leadership also contributes to muting creativity as their personal experiences determine what a good idea is. How many times have you been is a brainstorm when the creative lead crashes down all good thoughts based on his or past experience?
In conclusion
For me, group brainstorming is merely a quick way to come to a collective conclusion. Which is great if you’re happy with mediocre creativity.
Personally, I believe that a small core team needs to meet for only 15 minutes, where they get quickly briefed and sent away. At a dedicated time, everyone gets back to share their thoughts, one by one, without interruption.
Results? An array of well thought-out ideas which can be filtered down and refined.
Artwell Nwaila (@artwelln) is a creative director at Offlimit Communications and publisher of the award-winning creative publication SA Creatives (@thesacreatives). His monthly column on MarkLives, “Creation”, takes a look at creative work from around the world and what we can learn from it in South Africa.
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