The myth of brainstorming's effectiveness

The brainstorming session feels productive for the same reason karaoke feels musical: several people are making noise together and everybody has agreed to be encouraging. The evidence is less sociable. In many experiments, individuals working alone produced more ideas and better ones than groups following the classic rules.

That should surprise nobody who has watched thought queue behind speech. One person talks. Three others rehearse what they want to say. Someone forgets their idea. Someone junior hears the dominant direction and quietly edits out the useful oddity. The most fluent participant becomes the accidental theme for the next half-hour. Group energy is real. It is simply being mistaken for independent production.

Start separately and the social hierarchy arrives later. People can generate possibilities before knowing which answer carries status. Once the raw material exists, conversation becomes valuable: combinations appear, weaknesses get challenged and half-ideas find missing parts. The group is often excellent at collision and development. Asking it to originate everything simultaneously is the daft bit.

There are cases where live exchange is itself the mechanism, especially when knowledge is distributed and one contribution unlocks another. Even there, a minute of private thinking can prevent the first confident answer from defining the entire problem.

Counting sticky notes would be an equally silly substitute. Twenty paraphrases are not twenty ideas. The useful measure is distinct, workable possibilities that survive scrutiny later.

Everybody may leave a quieter session feeling less exhilarated. That is a poor reason to prefer fewer ideas with better refreshments.