Brainstorming Methods

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Author:
Kal Bishop

When leaders, consultants and managers require ideas, they automatically tend to herd people into a room and conduct a (usually ineffective) brainstorming session. One reason for their ineffectiveness is a failure to consider the impact of group size.

There is a pervasive belief that creativity is enhanced in larger groups. However, significant data indicates that large groups are detrimental to creative output. Some of the arguments against large groups are:

a) The sum of ideas produced by individuals acting alone is greater than the sum of ideas produced by those same individuals when acting as a group.

b) Large groups dilute ideas.

c) Symptoms of group think increase as a group gets larger due to the illusion of invulnerability, unquestioned belief in the group’s morality and rationalisation by collective justification of decisions.

d) As group size increases, the percentage of individual performance decreases. A single person is 95% engaged in a task, two people are each 90% engaged and the decline increases until it evens out at about 15 members to around 30%.

e) Groups of three to five elicit much more conformity than just one or two.

f) Large groups increase levels of evaluation apprehension and social loafing.

g) Large groups result in core and peripheral members, restricting information flow.

h) Conflict is inevitable as group size increases, causing sub-group formation and politicking.

i) Large groups create sub-groups with conflicting identitites and goals.

j) Large groups introduce time inefficiencies. 30 individuals can work on 30 problems and produce 150 ideas (30 x 5) in the same time that 1 group working on 1 problem and produces 5 ideas (1 x 5).

The above and other data suggests that group size should be kept small. But there are also benefits to large groups such as a high degree of intellectual cross pollination, a high degree of competency exchange and radical frame-breaking. And what are the pros and cons of individuals working alone and in pairs?

These and other topics are covered in depth in the MBA dissertation on Managing Creativity & Innovation, which can be purchased at a deep discount from the following link only: http://www.managing-creativity.com/deepdiscount.html

Kal Bishop, MBA, http://www.managing-creativity.com


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You are free to reproduce this article as long as the author's name and site URL are retained. A link to the MBA dissertation would be appreciated.

About the Author : Kal Bishop is a management consultant based in London, UK. He has consulted in the visual media and software industries and for clients such as Toshiba and Transport for London. He has led Improv, creativity and innovation workshops, exhibited artwork in San Francisco, Los Angeles and London and written a number of screenplays. He is a passionate traveller. He can be reached on http://www.managing-creativity.com. Source: www.isnare.com

A Quick Note From The Publisher... If you like the article above, you may be interested in the following article which is also related to Brainpower... Brainstorming - Don't Cloud Your Mind The brain is one amazing device. It's the centerpiece of the body, seemingly everything goes through the brain. Probably all the great inventions that have come through history, were originally inside someone's brain. Many studies have been done on the brain and the prevailing thought, is that most people use less then 10% of their brain capacity. Maybe the fact that people don't use their brains as much as they should, is why brainstorming was created. Brainstorming was the creation of Alex Osborn. Osborn was an ad exec. and he realized that normal business meetings, weren't creating the type of new ideas that he needed from his employees. He wanted to find a better way for each person to share their ideas. In a normal business meeting, most people are afraid to speak up. They're afraid of looking stupid, afraid of people laughing at their ideas and more than anything, they're afraid of being criticized. Osborn understood the fears that the employees had, so he had to come up with new rules, that would allow each person to give their ideas, without fear. The rules that Osborn created, became what is now known as brainstorming. The rules of brainstorming, is as follows, no ideas can be criticized, come up with as many ideas as possible, build on each others ideas and any strange or weird ideas are welcomed. What Osborn did was allow his employees to be individuals, at least during the brainstorming sessions. When people join a business, they usually have to put their personality aside. Businesses like people to conform to a certain way of thinking. Brainstorming gave people their personality back. It allowed them to speak their minds, without the fear of retribution. Osborn noticed that a lot more ideas were coming through the brainstorming sessions...