The New Yorker

The New Yorker

January 30, 2012

GROUPTHINK

The brainstorming myth

BY JONAH LEHRER

In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn,-a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. At the time, B.B.D.O. was widely regarded as the most innovative firm on Madison Avenue. Born in 1888, Osborn had spent much of his career in Buffalo, where he started out working in

Newspapers, and his life at B.B.D.O. began when he teamed up with another young adman he'd met volunteering for the United War Work Campaign. By the forties, he was one of the industry’s grand old men, ready to pass on the lessons he'd learned. His book, “Your Creative Power,” was published in 1948. An amalgam of pop science and business anecdote, it became a surprise best-seller. Osborn promised that, by following his advice, the typical reader could double his creative output. Such a mental boost would spur career success –“To get your foot in the door, your imagination can be an open-sesame" – and also make the reader a much happier person. “The more you rub your creative lamp, the more alive you feel," he wrote.

Repeated scientific debunking hasn't dented brainstorming's popularity.

“Your Creative Power” was filled with tricks and strategies, such as always carrying a notebook, to be readywhen inspiration struck. But Osborn's most celebrated idea was the one discussed in

Chapter 33, "How to Organize a Squadto Create Ideas." When a group works together, he wrote, the members shouldengage in a "brainstorm," which means"using the brain to storm a creativeproblem-and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking thesame objective." For Osborn, brainstorming was central to B.B.D.O.'s success. Osborn described, for instance, howthe technique inspired a group of tenadmen to come up with eighty-seven ideas for a new drugstore n ninetyminutes, or nearly an idea per minute. The brainstorm had turned his employeesinto imagination machines. The book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The most important of these, Osborn said -- the thing that distinguishes brainstorming from other types of group activity-was the absence of criticism andnegative feedback. If people were worried that their ideas might be ridiculed bythe group, the process would fail. "Creativityis so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” he wrote. “Forget quality; aim now to get a quantityof answers. When you’re through,your sheet of paper may be so full ofridiculous nonsense that you'll be disgusted. Never mind. You're loosening up your unfettered imagination – making you

mind deliver." Brainstorming enshrined a no-judgments approach toholding a meeting.

Brainstormingwas an immediate hitand Osborn became an influential business guru, writing such best-sellers as “WakeUp Your Mind" and “TheGoldMine Between Your Ears." Brainstormingprovided companies with an easyway to structure their group interactions, and it became the most widely used creativity technique in the world. Itis still popular in advertising offices anddesign firms, classrooms and boardrooms. “YourCreative Power" has even inspired academic institutes, such as theInternational Center for Studies in Creativity, at Buffalo State College, near where Osborn lived. And it has given rise to detailed pedagogical doctrines, such as the Osborn-Parnes CreativeProblem Solving Process, which is frequently employed by business consultants. When people want to extract thebest ideas from a group, they still obey

Osborn's cardinal rule, censoring criticismand encouraging the most "freewheeling” associations At the design firm IDEO, famous for developing thefirst Apple mouse, brainstorming is"practically a religion," according to thecompany's general manager. Employees are instructed to "defer judgment" and"go for quantity." The underlying assumption of brainstormingis that if people are scared ofsaying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of thisidea is obvious: it's always nice to besaturated in positive feedback. Typically,participants leave a brainstormingsession proud oftheir contribution. Thewhiteboard has been filled with freeassociations. Brainstorming seems likean ideal technique, a feel-good wayto boost productivity. But there is aproblem with brainstorming. It doesn'twork.

The first empirical test of Osborn'sbrainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given aseries of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn's guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzlesto forty-eight studentsworking by themselves. The resultswere a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students carne up with roughlytwice as many solutions as the brainstorminggroups, and a panel ofjudgesdeemed their solutions more "feasible"and "effective." Brainstorming didn't unleash the potential of the group, butrather made each individual less creative. Although the findings did nothing tohurt brainstorming's popularity, numerousfollow-up studies have come to thesame conclusion. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, hassummarized the science: "Decades ofresearch have consistently shown thatbrainstorming groups think of far fewerideas than the same number of peoplewho work alone and later pool theirideas."

And yet Osborn was right about onething: like it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process. "Many of us can work much bettercreatively when teamed up," he wrote,noting that the trend was particularlyapparent in science labs. "In the new

B. F. Goodrich Research Center" -- Goodrich was an important B.B.D.O. client -- 250workers…are hard on thehunt for ideas every hour, every day,” he noted. 'Theyare divided into 12 specialized groups -- one for each majorphase of chemistry, one for each majorphase of physics, and so on." Osborn wasquick to see that science had ceasedto besolitary.

BenJones, a professor at the KelloggSchool of Management, at NorthwesternUniversity, has quantified this trend. By analyzing 19 .9 million peer-reviewedacademic papers and2.I million patentsfrom the past fifty years, he has shownthat levels of teamwork have increasedinmore than ninety-five per cent of scientificsubfields; the size of the averageteam has increased by about twenty percent each decade. The most frequentlycited studiesin a field used to be the product ofa lone genius, like Einstein or Darwin. Today, regardless of whether researchersare studying particle physics orhuman genetics, science papers by multiple authors receive more than twice asmany citations as those by individuals. This trendwas even more apparentwhenit came to so-called "home-run papers" -- publications with at least a hundred

citations. Thesewere more than sixtimes as likely to come from a team ofscientists.

Jones's explanation is that scientificadvances have led to a situationwhere allthe remaining problems are incrediblyhard. Researchers are forced to becomeincreasingly specialized, because there'sonly so much information one mind canhandle. And theyhave to collaborate, becausethe most interesting mysteries lieat the intersections of disciplines. "A

hundred years ago, the Wright brotherscould build an airplane all by themselves,” Jones says. “Now Boeing needshundreds of engineers just to designand produce the engines.” The largerlessonis that the increasing complexity ofhuman knowledge, coupled with the escalating

difficulty of those remainingquestions, means that people must eitherwork together or fail alone. But if brainstorming is useless, the question still remains: What’s the best template for

soup creativity?

In 2003, Charlan Nemeth, a professorof psychology at the University of Californiaat Berkeley, divided two hundredand sixty-five female undergraduates intoteams of five. She gave all the teams the same problem -- "How can traffic congestionbe reduced in the San

Francisco Bay Area?" – andassigned each team one ofthree conditions. The first setof teams got the standardbrainstorming spiel, includingthe no-criticism groundrules. Other teams-assignedwhat Nemeth called the “debate” conditionwere told, “Mostresearch and advice suggestthat the best way to come up withgood solutions is to come up with manysolutions. Freewheeling is welcome; don’t be afraid to say anything that comes tomind. However, in addition, most studiessuggest that you should debate andeven criticize eachothe/s ideas.” The restreceived no further instructions, leavingthem free to collaborate however theywanted. All the teams had twenty minutesto come up with as many good solutionsas possible. The results were telling. The brainstorming groups slightly outperformedthe groups given no instructions, butteams given the debate condition werethe mostcreative by far. On average, they generated nearly twenty percent moreideas. And, after the teams disbanded,another interesting result became apparent. Researchers asked each subject individuallyif she had any more ideas abouttraffic. The brainstormers and the peoplegiven no guidelines produced an average of three additional ideas; the debatersproduced seven.

Nemeth's studies suggest that theineffectiveness of brainstorming stems from the very thing that Osborn thoughtwas most important. As Nemeth puts it, “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize'isoften cited as the important instruction inbrainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductivestrategy. Our findings showthat debate and criticism do not inhibitideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.” Osborn thoughtthat imagination is inhibited by the merest hint of criticism, but Nemeth’s workand a number ofother studies have demonstratedthat it can thrive on conflict.

According to Nemeth, dissent stimulatesnew ideas becauseit encourages usto engage more fully with the work ofothers and to reassess our viewpoints. “There's this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when workingtogether is stay positive and get along,to not hurt anyone's feelings," she says. “Well, that's just wrong. Maybe debate isgoing to be less pleasant, butit will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.”

Another of her experimentshas demonstrated thatexposure to unfamiliar perspectives

can foster creativity. The experimentfocussed on a staple of the brainstorming orthodoxy – free associationAlong-standing problem with free association is that people aren’tverygood at it. In the early nineteen-sixties, two psychologists,David Palermo and James Jenkins,began amassing a huge table of word associations, the first thoughts that comettomind when people are asked to reflect ona particular word. (They interviewedmore than forty-five hundred subjects.) Palermo andJenkins soon discovered that the vast majority of these associationswere utterly predictable. For instance,when people are asked to free-associateabout the word "blue," the most likely first answer is “green,” followed by “sky” 'and "ocean." When asked to free-associate about "green," nearly everyone says “grass.” "Even the most creative people are still

going to come up with many mundane associations,” Nemeth says. “If you want to be original, then you have to get past this first layer of predictability.”

Nemeth's experiment devised a wayof escaping this trap. Pairs of subjectswere shown a series ofcolor slides invariousshades ofblue and asked to identifythe colors. Sometimes one ofthe pairwasactuallya lab assistant instructed by Nemethto provide awrong answer. After afew minutes, the pairs were asked to freeassociateabout the colors they had seen.People who had been exposed to inaccuratedescriptions carne up with associations that were far more original. Instead of saying that “blue” reminded them of “sky,” theycame up with “jazz” and “berry pie.” The obvious answer had stoppedbeing their only answer. Even when alternative views were clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creativepotential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearingsomeone shout out an errant answer, wework to understand it, which causes us toreassess our initial assumptions and tryout new perspectives. “Authentic dissentcan be difficult, but it's always invigorating,” Nemeth says. “Itwakes us right up.”

Criticism allows people to dig below the surface of the imagination andcome up with collective ideas that aren’tpredictable. And recognizing the importanceof conflicting perspectives in agroup raises the issue of what kinds ofpeople will work together best. Brian

Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, has spent his career trying to find what theideal composition of a team would looklike. Casting around for an industry tostudy that would most clearly show theeffects ofinteraction, he hit on Broadwaymusicals. He'd grown up in New YorkCity and attended his first musical at the age of nine. "I went to see ‘Hair,’” Uzzi recalls. “I remember absolutely nothingabout the music, but I do remember thenude scene. That just about blew my

mind. I’ve been afan of Broadway eversince."

Uzziseesmusicals asa model ofgroup creativity. “Nobody creates a Broadway musical by themselves,” he said. “Theproduction requires too many differentkinds of talent.” Acomposer has to write songs with a lyricist and a librettist; achoreographer has to workwith a director,who is probably getting notes fromthe producers.

Uzziwanted to understand how therelationships of these team membersaffected the product. Was it betterto have a group composed of closefriends who had worked together before? Or did strangers make better theatre? He undertook a study of everymusical produced on Broadway between1945 and1989. To get a full list of collaborators,he sometimes had to trackdown dusty old Playbills in theatre basements. He spent years analyzing the teams behind four hundred and seventy-fourproductions, and charted the relationshipsof thousands of artists, fromCole Porter to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Uzzi found that the people whoworked on Broadwaywere part of a social network with lots of interconnections:it didn't take many links to getfrom the librettist of "Guys and Dolls" tothe choreographer of"Cats." Uzzi devised a way to quantify the density ofthese connections, a figure he called Q. If musicals were being developed by teamsof artists that had worked together severaltimes before-a common practice,because Broadway producers see "incumbent

teams" as less risky – those musicalswould have an extremelyhigh Q. A musical created by a team ofstrangers wouldhave a low Q.

Uzzi then tallied his Qreadings withinformation about how successful theproductions had been. "Frankly, I was surprised by howbig the effect was, “Uzzitold me. "I expected Qto matter, but Ihad no idea it would matter this much.” According to the data, the relationshipsamong collaborators emerged as a reliablepredictor of Broadway success. When the Q was low – less than 1.7 onUzzr's five-point scale – the musicalswere likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggledto work together and exchange ideas. "This wasn't so surprising,” Uzzi says. “Ittakes time to develop a successful collaboration.” But, when the Qwas too high(above 3.2), thework also suffered. Theartists all thought in similarways, which

crushed innovation. According to Uzzi, this is what happened on Broadway duringthe nineteen-twenties, which hemade the focus of a separate study. Thedecade is remembered for its glittering array of talent – Cole Porter, RichardRodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, and so on – but Uzzi’s data revealsthat ninety per cent ofmusicals producedduring the decade were flops, farabove the historical norm. "Broadwayhad some of the biggest names ever,” Uzzi explains. “But the shows were toofull of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity.”

The best Broadway shows were producedby networks with an intermediatelevel ofsocial intimacy. The ideal level of Q – which Uzzi and his colleague JarrettSpiro called the "bliss point" – emergedas being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was withinthis range was three times more likely tobe a commercial success than a musicalproduced by a team with a score below1.4 or above 3.2. Itwas also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. “The bestBroadway teams, by far, werethose with a mix of relationships," Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends,but they also had newbies. This mixturemeant that the artists could interact efficiently – they had a familiar structure to fall back on – but they also managedto incorporate some new ideas. Theywere comfortable with each other, but they wererit too comfortable.”

Uzzi’s favorite example of “intermediate Q” is “West Side Story,” one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever. In I957,the playwas seen as a radical departurefrom Broadway conventions,both for its focus on social problems andfor its extended dance scenes. The conceptwas dreamed up byJerome Robbins,Leonard Bernstein, and ArthurLaurents. They were all Broadway legends,which might make “West Side Story” looklike a showwith high Q. Butthe project also benefitted from a crucialinjection of unknown talent, as the establishedartists realized that they neededa fresh lyrical voice. After an extensivesearch, they chose a twenty-five-year-oldlyricist who had never worked on aBroadway musical before. His name wasStephen Sondheim.

A few years ago, Isaac Kohane, a .researcher at Harvard MedicalSchool, published a study that looked atscientific research conducted by groupsin an attempt to determine the effect that physical proximityhad on the quality of the research. He analyzed morethan thirty-five thousand peer-reviewedpapers, mapping the precise location ofco-authors. Then he assessed the qualityof the research by counting the numberof subsequent citations. The task, Kohane says, took a “small army of undergraduates” eighteen months to complete. Once the data was amassed, thecorrelation became clear: when coauthors were closer together, their paperstended to be of significantlyhigher quality. The best research was consistentlyproduced when scientists were workingwithin ten metres of each other; the leastcited papers tended to emerge from collaborators who were a kilometre or more apart. “If you want people to work togethereffectively, these findings reinforcethe need to create architectures thatsupport frequent, physical, spontaneousinteractions," Kohane says. “Even in theera of big science, when researchersspend so much time on the Internet,it's still so important to create intimate spaces.”