| While the article is making some good points, I don't agree with the overall article or its conclusions. A lot of the arguments in the article made against brainstorming are what I would consider implementation failures. The corollary to Production Blocking occurs when a person realizes that the supposedly crazy idea that they were holding on to themselves for fear of being judged is not as crazy as they thought it is when they hear another person in the room say the same thing. It might even build allies and consensus leading to offline collaboration outside of the brainstorming context. Evaluation Apprehension is a real concern. If a brainstorming session is run well, the facilitator would have established the ground rules (no interruptions, no judgments etc.,) and would quickly bring any conflicting behavior to an end. The most important benefit of brainstorming, imo, is the fact that introverts are not drowned out by extroverts or junior team members being overruled on the spot by experienced people. This is not a bug, it is a feature. In many scenarios, the person who comes up with the idea is not the same one who implements it. For eg: an end user of a system, a software engineer, a product manager etc., Having a diverse group where individuals play different roles tends to bring out differing perspectives. If you can't bring them out in the open in the early stages of idea generation, you are clearly missing out. Edward de Bono, the person who coined the term Lateral Thinking has developed a lot of tools for creative thinking. His book, Serious Creativity changed my mindset and taught me that creativity, the kind we use every day as opposed to artistic creativity like painting/acting etc., is something that one can practice everyday and get better at. One such method / tool that he developed is Six Thinking Hats. In the book, he goes on to explain that the underlying cause of perceived lack of psychological safety is the human brain's ability to get into conflicting thinking modes for eg: when one person is in creative mode, another person is in evaluation mode or what de Bono calls as Green Hat and Black Hat respectively. Much of his work in Six Thinking Hats is around getting the entire group in the same thinking mode, what de Bono calls as Parallel Thinking. Here's a nice video of him explaining some of the thinking processes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbsKQQGwsMg Recognizing this (different thinking modes) is key to having a productive group brainstorm and avoiding pitfalls. |