Concept
Brainwriting Effect (Individual Ideation Before Group Brainstorming)
creativity collaboration ideation
A traditional group brainstorm — everyone generating ideas out loud together — tends to become a reflection of the room's existing power dynamics rather than a genuine pooling of ideas, since louder or more senior voices dominate what gets said and heard. Bruce Daisley describes a more effective sequence: have people generate ideas individually or in small groups first, in writing, then bring those ideas to the wider group.
A 2012 article in The New Yorker compared this approach against the traditional open brainstorm and found it roughly doubled both creativity and the number of genuinely effective suggestions produced (see New Yorker Brainwriting Meta-Study). Daisley frames this as making better use of humans' genuine collective-intelligence advantage — combining individually-generated ideas — rather than the surface appearance of "collaboration" a live group brainstorm creates.
Discussed in
- Episode 22 — 22- How to be a good boss