Brainstorming is broken.

We all know the standard method of brainstorming:

1. Get a bunch of people together.
2. Generate lots of ideas.
3. Don’t be critical.

There’s one problem with this system.

It’s totally wrong.

1) Don’t work in a group

The research consistently shows that individuals who generate ideas on their own and then meet afterward come up with more (and better) ideas.

Via Imagine: How Creativity Works:

There’s just one problem with brainstorming: it doesn’t work. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, summarizes 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.” In fact, the very first empirical test of Osborn’s technique, which was performed at Yale in 1958, soundly refuted the premise. The experiment was simple: Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to carefully follow Osborn’s brainstorming guidelines. As a control sample, forty-eight students working by themselves were each given the same puzzles. The results were a sobering refutation of brainstorming. Not only did the solo students come up with twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups but their solutions were deemed more “feasible” and “effective” by a panel of judges. In other words, brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group. Instead, the technique suppressed it, making each individual less creative.

Performance gets worse as group size increases.

Via Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking:

The results were unambiguous. The men in twenty-three of the twenty-four groups produced more ideas when they worked on their own than when they worked as a group. They also produced ideas of equal or higher quality when working individually. And the advertising executives were no better at group work than the presumably introverted research scientists. Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

2) Don’t generate as many ideas as possible.

Don’t write down every idea “no matter how crazy.” Rules help.

Focusing your efforts on being as creative as possible reduces the number of ideas but increases the number of good ideas.

Via Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

Researchers next looked for idea-generating rules that would work even better than Osborn’s. They told their subjects: “The more imaginative or creative your ideas, the higher your score will be. Each idea will be scored in terms of (1) how unique or different it is— how much it differs from the common use and (2) how valuable it is— either socially, artistically, economically, etc.” These instructions are very different from those given for classic brainstorming because people are being told to use specific directions in judging which ideas they come up with. Groups working with these instructions have fewer ideas than brainstorming groups, but they have more good ideas. What’s most important is being explicitly told to be imaginative, unique, and valuable; then, it’s okay if your critical faculties are still engaged. Osborn had one thing right: Most people use the wrong criteria to evaluate their ideas; they think about what will work, about what worked before, or about what is familiar to them. This discovery— that when subjects are told they’ll be evaluated for creativity, they’re more creative than when they’re told not to use any criteria at all— has been reproduced repeatedly in the laboratory. When groups are asked to suggest good, creative solutions, they have fewer ideas but those ideas are better than those generated by groups using the brainstorming rules.

3) Be critical and fight.

Don’t be open and accepting. Fight. When people debate, they are more creative.

Via Imagine: How Creativity Works:

Which teams did the best? The results weren’t even close: while the brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, people in the debate condition were far more creative. On average, they generated nearly 25 percent more ideas. The most telling part of the study, however, came after the groups had been disbanded. That’s when researchers asked each of the subjects if he or she had any more ideas about traffic that had been triggered by the earlier conversation. While people in the minimal and brainstorming conditions produced, on average, two additional ideas, those in the debate condition produced more than seven. Nemeth summarizes her results: “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the [most] important instruction in this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.”

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Adam Alter

Adam Alter is an assistant professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business. His new book Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave explores the incredible (and vastly underestimated) power of context in our lives.

Adam and I spoke about the color that can make you appear sexy and powerful, what money means to your brain, and how the weather influences your ability to think.

My conversation with Adam was over an hour long, so for brevity’s sake I’m only going to post edited highlights here.

If you want the extended interview I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

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The Power of Context – Little things can make a big difference

Adam Alter:

In “Drunk Tank Pink“, I open with an anecdote that I think is a good emblem for a lot of the things that I talk about in the book. And that’s the effect of this shade of pink, in the beginning it was on prisoners in a naval prison. And this shade of pink some psychologists realized actually calmed down the prisoners and made them much more well-behaved and tranquilized them. And even the most aggressive of them, when they came out of the holding cell that had been painted this bright bubblegum pink shade were calmer, more manageable, more malleable. And I think the reason that it’s a good emblem for the other effects is that it’s something that no one expected ahead of time.

Everyone knows that pink is different from blue is different from red; and we have a pretty good sense that colors matter in some way. But what we don’t realize is the extent to which they seem to matter. So, this shade of pink, the effects that it has on people I think are far greater than anyone would imagine. It’s just one case of many in the book showing how much greater the effects are of these contextual factors than we imagine them to be.

Money means possibilities

Adam Alter:

I talk about symbols and how symbols influence us. I think the most striking part of that chapter is probably the effect of money on us. And there is some evidence that when you see money being destroyed, that it’s metaphorically like watching possibilities being extinguished. The brain actually registers pain when you watch money being destroyed.

Also, seeing money makes us less likely to help people. If we’re keeping a count of money or we happened to see an image of money, we are less helpful. We’re also less willing to ask for help. We experience less physical pain. We are able to withstand physical pain more than we could if we hadn’t just been exposed to money. So it is an incredibly powerful symbol.

Red makes you appear sexy and powerful

Adam Alter:

I talk a lot about the color red, because it has fascinating effects for all sorts of biological reasons. The color red is associated most strongly with blood. And blood in different settings means very different things. In the context of romance, the rush of blood to someone’s face signals romantic interest. And if a woman puts up six photos of herself online, each where she’s wearing a different color shirt that are otherwise identical, she will have more hits very reliably, if she’s wearing a red shirt. It’s actually true for men as well; the color red stimulates sexual interest in people. It gives them the sense that you’re sexually interested. And so in an online dating context, red is very powerful.

Of course, the color red means different things in other settings. It can mean that you’re aggressive, and you’re ready to fight. A rush of blood to the face is no longer about sexual interest. In some contexts it means that you’re angry. There’s some pretty good evidence from Olympic events to suggest that when Olympic athletes who are in combat even like tae kwon do, wrestling or judo, when those athletes are randomly assigned to wear either red or blue for their bouts, it turns out that even when they’re evenly matched the ones who wear red tend to do better than the ones who wear blue. Their win rate goes up because they are wearing red. And that could be because they behave more aggressively when they see the color red on themselves, because their opponent sees them and feels that they are more aggressive and imposing. Or there’s actually good evidence to suggest that the referee sees a person who is wearing red as more dominant than the one wearing blue. And so if you give a referee the same bout, they are watching the same event that you Photoshop the uniforms, they will give the win to the person wearing red even if it’s a different person across different conditions. And so they really are swayed by this stuff.

The weather affects your ability to think

Adam Alter:

On sunny days we actually think a little bit less clearly. We think more clearly on cloudier days because that makes us a little bit less happy. It tempers our moods, and when our mood is tempered we automatically seek ways to improve our moods, and it makes us more thoughtful. So in one experiment people left a small shop in Sydney, Australia. And when they left that shop on cloudy days, they were more observant and did a better job of remembering the features of the shops, of the layout of the shops than they did on sunny days.

Nature is a painkiller

Adam Alter:

As a scientist who studies human functioning and the way we think and feel and behave, I was skeptical about the research on nature and how nature could make us feel happier and better and think more clearly and recover from illness more quickly. I always found that to be a little hard to believe, but in doing the research for the book I’m completely convinced by these effects. I’m not 100% sure exactly of the mechanisms in nature that lead to these effects, but I think there are some fascinating ideas. But the effects are striking. And one of them is that people who are recovering in hospital who happen to be looking out at a stand of trees rather than a brick wall recover a day more quickly, in this case from bladder surgery.

That was the experiment done. And they required fewer painkillers. They complained to the nurses much less often. And the patients were identical to patients in other rooms with brick wall views. This view of nature is enough to make them feel better and to hasten their recovery. And the same is true about children in the long run. Children who happen to have experienced great stress as young kids do much better when they have a buffer in nature. So if they happen to live in a natural setting or their parents happen to have potted plants in the home or they just generally play outdoors in a natural setting, they like to play games that take place outdoors like soccer on a green field. All of that has major effects in buffering them against stress, against the negative effects of stress. So to me, that was the single biggest takeaway. And as someone who lives in New York City, I’m trying to bring in potted plants into my home because that’s really my only option here, unfortunately. I’m going to be running in Central Park more than I do right now.

How does context affect who you are?

Adam Alter:

As people move to different locations they become different versions of themselves. And the most extreme version of social psychology suggests we are always at the mercy of situations, of contexts, and that obviously resonates for you because you talked about it a lot on your blog. I think what the book suggests is that there is no single version of who we are, that we are malleable. We are different people in different contexts. We are more likely to leave litter on the ground when we happen to be in a dirty place. We are more likely to be honest when we see ourselves in the mirror or when there is a blue light shining that reminds us of the police, or when there’s a pair of eyes nearby that makes us feel like we’re being watched — even if it’s just an image on a billboard. What’s important about all of this is that we have this sense that there is a thread that runs through us, through time and who we are that ties us together from moment to moment. And I do think there is to some extent a thread and that people are different. Some people are going to be different in enduring ways and in chronic ways. But at the same time I think there’s far more within a person’s variance than we think or that we recognize. So I would say that’s the main striking point through all of this study. There are different versions of us. There is no single version of us.

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If you want the extended interview (where Adam discusses how your name can dramatically affect your life and the ways in which context can make us hate or like murderers) I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

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Great creative teams — what do they all have in common? What can we learn from them?

Keith Sawyer got his PhD studying under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the researcher who coined the idea of Flow. Sawyer looked at how creativity came about in collaborations vs. individuals. He analyzed jazz ensembles, improv comedy groups and other great creative teams to see what worked.

What did he find?

Via Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

1. Innovation Emerges over Time

No single actor comes up with the big picture, the whole plot. The play emerges bit by bit. Each actor, in each line of dialogue, contributes a small idea. In theater, we can see this process on stage; but with an innovative team, outsiders never see the long chain of small, incremental ideas that lead to the final innovation. Without scientific analysis, the collaboration remains invisible. Successful innovations happen when organizations combine just the right ideas in just the right structure.

2. Successful Collaborative Teams Practice Deep Listening

Trained improv actors listen for the new ideas that the other actors offer in their improvised lines, at the same time that they’re coming up with their own ideas. This difficult balancing act is essential to group genius. Most people spend too much time planning their own actions and not enough time listening and observing others.

3. Team Members Build on Their Collaborators’ Ideas

When teams practice deep listening, each new idea is an extension of the ideas that have come before. The Wright brothers couldn’t have thought of a moving vertical tail until after they discovered adverse yaw, and that discovery emerged from their experiments with wing warping. Although a single person may get credit for a specific idea, it’s hard to imagine that person having that idea apart from the hard work, in close quarters, of a dedicated team of like-minded individuals. Russ Mahon— one of the Morrow Dirt Club bikers from Cupertino— usually gets credit for putting the first derailleur on a fat-tired bike, but all ten members of the club played a role.

4. Only Afterwards Does the Meaning of Each Idea Become Clear

Even a single idea can’t be attributed to one person because ideas don’t take on their full importance until they’re taken up, reinterpreted, and applied by others. At the beginning of Jazz Freddy’s performance, we don’t know what John is doing: Is he studying for a test? Is he balancing the books of a criminal organization? Although he was the first actor to think of “studying,” the others decided that he would be a struggling umpire, a man stubbornly refusing to admit that he needed glasses. Individual creative actions take on meaning only later, after they are woven into other ideas, created by other actors. In a creative collaboration, each person acts without knowing what his or her action means. Participants are willing to allow other people to give their action meaning by building on it later.

5. Surprising Questions Emerge

The most transformative creativity results when a group either thinks of a new way to frame a problem or finds a new problem that no one had noticed before. When teams work this way, ideas are often transformed into questions and problems. That’s critical, because creativity researchers have discovered that the most creative groups are good at finding new problems rather than simply solving old ones.

6. Innovation Is Inefficient

In improvisation, actors have no time to evaluate new ideas before they speak. But without evaluation, how can they make sure it’ll be good? Improvised innovation makes more mistakes, and has as many misses as hits. But the hits can be phenomenal; they’ll make up for the inefficiency and the failures. After the full hourlong Jazz Freddy performance, we never do learn why Bill and Mary are making copies for John— that idea doesn’t go anywhere. In the second act, a brief subplot in which two actors are in the witness protection program also is never developed. Some ideas are just bad ideas; some of them are good in themselves, but the other ideas that would be necessary to turn them into an innovation just haven’t happened yet. In a sixty-minute improvisation, many ideas are proposed that are never used. When we look at an innovation after the fact, all we remember is the chain of good ideas that made it into the innovation; we don’t notice the many dead ends.

7. Innovation Emerges from the Bottom Up

Improvisational performances are self-organizing. With no director and no script, the performance emerges from the joint actions of the actors. In the same way, the most innovative teams are those that can restructure themselves in response to unexpected shifts in the environment; they don’t need a strong leader to tell them what to do. Moreover, they tend to form spontaneously; when like-minded people find each other, a group emerges. The improvisational collaboration of the entire group translates moments of individual creativity into group innovation. Allowing the space for this self-organizing emergence to occur is difficult for many managers because the outcome is not controlled by the management team’s agenda and is therefore less predictable. Most business executives like to start with the big picture and then work out the details. In improvisational innovation, teams start with the details and then work up to the big picture. It’s riskier and less efficient, but when a successful innovation emerges, it’s often so surprising and imaginative that no single individual could have thought of it.

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