Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work : The New Yorker
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 07:43AM 
ANNALS OF IDEAS about brainstorming and creativity. In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner of the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared all of his creative secrets. “Your Creative Power” was filled with a variety of tricks and strategies, but Osborn’s most celebrated idea was the one discussed in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.”
When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm.”
The book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The single most important of these, Osborn said, was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became a popular business guru. The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution.
The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. At such moments, brainstorming can seem like an ideal mental technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is one overwhelming problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work. The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn.
Although the findings did nothing to dent brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. And yet Osborn was right about one thing: like it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process. Ben Jones, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern University, has quantified this trend.
By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed academic papers and 2.1 million patents from the past fifty years, he has shown that levels of teamwork have increased in more than ninety-five per cent of scientific subfields.
Discusses the work of Charlan Nemeth, whose studies suggest that the ineffectiveness of brainstorming stems from the very thing that Osborn thought was most important. “Debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition,” Nemeth said. Discusses Brian Uzzi’s research on collaboration and interaction in the creation of Broadway musicals. Tells about M.I.T.’s Building 20, built in 1943.
By the time it was finally demolished, in 1998, Building 20 had become a legend of innovation, widely regarded as one of the most creative spaces in the world. In the postwar decades, scientists working there pioneered a stunning list of breakthroughs, from the development of high-speed photography to the physics behind microwaves. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself.
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