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Brainstorming Ineffectiveness

creativity group-psychology decision-making

Traditional group brainstorming — get everyone in a room, defer judgment, build on others' ideas, aim for quantity and wild ideas — reliably produces fewer and lower-quality ideas than the same people working independently. Sheena Iyengar calls it "a bias-making machine": the moment the first person speaks, everyone else's thinking anchors to that idea, and the group stops generating independent information or judgments, instead converging via Anchoring & Contrast Effect, conformity-driven agreement (see Social Proof), and Social Loafing — essentially Groupthink compressed into a single meeting. Iyengar also notes that groups jump straight to proposing solutions before properly defining the problem, contributing to the roughly 72% of companies she says end up solving the wrong problem entirely.

The founding demonstration: a 1987 study by Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe split participants into groups of four, some working as a traditional brainstorming team, some generating ideas independently. Individuals working alone produced twice as many unique ideas as the same number of people brainstorming together (see Diehl Stroebe Brainstorming Study).

Social influence degrades judgment the same way in aggregated ratings, not just live brainstorms. Duncan Watts's "Music Lab" experiment let 14,000 visitors rate 48 unknown songs; one group rated independently with no visibility into others' scores, eight other groups could see how their peers had already rated each song. In the social-influence groups, early positive ratings snowballed into runaway popularity regardless of the song's actual merit, and final rankings varied wildly between the eight parallel social groups depending purely on which songs happened to get early praise. The independent-judgment group showed far more natural variance and no such herding (see Watts Music-Lab Social-Influence Study).

The fix isn't abandoning group discussion, but reordering it. Iyengar recommends: first, have each person independently observe and report what they're seeing on the ground, before any solution is proposed — this alone roughly triples the quality of information reaching the group. Second, once the problem is properly defined, send a diverse group (she recommends five people, an odd number, each bringing different knowledge and networks) out separately to research how the problem has been solved elsewhere — deliberately not letting them collaborate at this stage, to preserve the diversity of the strategies they bring back. Only then does the group convene to compare and combine what they found independently.

Persistence matters as much as method. A study by Brian Lucas asked students to generate Thanksgiving-dinner ideas across two 10-minute rounds separated by a break; every participant predicted their best ideas would come in round one, but independent raters found the second round consistently produced more original ideas (see Lucas Thanksgiving-Idea Persistence Study). Separately, a study by Melanie Brooks found that explicitly telling people to "think creatively" while generating ideas produced fewer and less novel ideas than giving the same task with no mention of creativity at all — the instruction itself adds pressure that closes down open exploration (see Brooks Creativity-Mandate Suppression Study). And contrary to the assumption that inspiring physical spaces drive innovation, a comparison of Bell Labs' two very differently-designed buildings — one plain, one architecturally striking — found no meaningful difference in Nobel Prize output between them (see Bell Labs Building-Design Innovation Comparison).

A dark parallel: a 1944 OSS field manual for sympathizers in occupied territory, titled A Simple Sabotage Field Manual, explicitly recommended undermining an organization by referring everything to committees, insisting on debate and multiple channels, and holding conferences instead of making decisions — precisely describing standard brainstorming and committee behavior as a covert sabotage technique (see OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual).

Discussed in

  • Episode 146 — 146-do-brainstorms-actually-work

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