We've all been there. The flip charts at the front of the room. The post-it-notes around the walls. The plate that once detained a packet of custard creams. The incessant doodling. The standing up and the sitting down. The glazed eyes staring into deep space. The tap, tap, tap of biro against skull. And the mind-numbingly crap ideas served up by the barrow load.
Why on earth do people think this kind of session will somehow spark creativity? More often than not the exact opposite happens, yet ad agencies and design firms around the world still insist that brainstorming is a great way to tackle a problem. In fact at some agencies brainstorming is 'practically a religion'.
Well sorry to disagree but the fact is brainstorming rarely contributes anything of note. Evidence shows that getting a group of people to think individually or as a team of two, is often more productive than getting them to think as a group.
So who is to blame for all this brainstorming nonsense? Well I've done a bit of research and it seems we need to point our fingers at one Alex Osborn.
In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency BBDO wrote a book in which he shared his creative secrets. At the time, BBDO was regarded as the most innovative firm on Madison Avenue and Osborn was one of the industry's grand old men. His book 'Your Creative Power' was published in 1948 and Osborn promised that, by following his advice, the typical reader could double his creative output.
'Your Creative Power' was filled with tricks and strategies, such as always carrying a notebook, to be ready when inspiration struck. But Osborn's most celebrated idea was the one titled, 'How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas'. You see, Osborn believed that brainstorming was central to BBDO's success.
He outlined the basic rules of a successful brainstorming session. The most important of these, he said 'the thing that distinguishes brainstorming from other types of group activity' was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. If people were worried that their ideas might be ridiculed by the group, the process would fail. 'Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it in the bud.'
Thus it came to pass that brainstorming would grow to be the most widely used creativity technique in the world.
It is still is.
And it doesn't work.
In fact with brainstorming - you achieve less.
Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: 'Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.'
John Fountain is a freelance copywriter
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