| I think this article is a good critique of the current "fast-food" like brainstorming session many people/companies are running. I name them fast-food-like because most of the brainstorming sessions are something like "Let's have a 1-hour meeting and brainstorm some ideas". It is expecting people to go in a creative flow instantly after the meeting has started and also feel psychologically safe when entering the room/zoom call. No preparation made, no group forming, nothing to actually prepare the meeting. It is a pure form of wanting to just get ideas as fast as possible from participants' brains. I strongly recommend anyone to read the "Applied Immagination" book by Osborn. It is where he (first) talked at large about brain storming sessions. Can be read freely on the Internet Archive Open Library. I will just give here three important points from that book, where Osborn talk about how to organise such sessions. First, it talks about the importance of facilitators. Here are the requirements Osborn had for facilitators: - Should ask stimulating questions - Should have plans for guiding the generation of ideas - Should provide warm-up exercises - Should teach and reinforce the guidelines - Should do the planning and scheduling of follow-up sessions Then, it talks about the profile of the participant: should be a self-starter and should have experience with the matter/area related to the brainstorming subject. And then it lays out how the session should be organised: 1. Preparation of the type of the problem to be approached 2. Send a one-page background and invitation memo to participants describing the task to be solved with some example of the type of ideas desired 3. Individual ideation should be done by each participant on their own in advance before the group session 4. Group brainstorming session - with the duration between 30 and 45 minutes 5. Follow-up individual ideation should happen again after the group session As one can notice doing such brainstorming sessions as designed by Osborn is very different that what we see normally in a company/organization where someone just sends an invite with the title "Brainstorming about new feature/solution for ..." and then expects people to come and be creative. As a side note, I also recommend reading The Art of Thought by Graham Wallace. While the psychology of creativity has done many advanced in the last 100 years, his book has still defined the general concept for what people now call creative problem-solving. I read both books and I managed to publish a summary of the Art of Thought on my blog, but not on the Applied Imagination by Osborn. Hope to find time for this soon. |