I am reading a very enjoyable book called The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt right now. It’s a darkly comic western set along the Pacific Coast in 1851. It’s creative, inventive and great fun.

And it was written by only one person. This guy.

No one ever heard of a book – a good book – being written by a committee. The very idea! Sure, there are acknowledgements in the front of every great tome, but that’s not the same.

Good ideas don’t come from committees. That used to be a prejudice. Now it’s a scientific fact.

A meta-analytic review of over 800 teams shows that individuals are more likely to generate a higher number of original ideas when they DON’T interact with others. Brainstorming actually harms productivity – especially in large teams.

What went wrong?

Brainstorming was invented by 50s ad guy Alex Osborn. It works on four basic principles. You get together with your co-workers and then:

1. Generate lots of ideas;

2. Prioritize unusual or original ones;

3. Combine and refine those ideas;

4. Don’t criticise them until later.

The idea is that by getting together with others, people try harder and quantity eventually leads to quality ideas.

Osborn said it would lead to a boost in performance by 50%, compared with people working on their own.

WRONG!

According to Harvard Business Review there are four reasons why that is not the case:

1. Social loafing: in reality people don’t try harder, they try less hard.

2. Social anxiety: People worry about how their ideas will be treated.

3. Regression to the mean: a process of downward adjustment means the most talented members of a team end up matching the peformance of their less talented peers.

4. Production blocking: people can only express one idea at one time. The number of ideas per person actually declines as the size of the group gets bigger.

So, given the evidence that it does not work, why do it?

Stakeholder buy-in, compadre.

It’s a management placebo, designed to make employees feel good.

So, now we’ve had our brainstorming meeting and generated second rate ideas, we are all willing to put them into practice.

Yay.

Now, back to your desk.

 

Posted in: Big Picture story