Bruce Nussbaum and Jessie Scanlon from BusinessWeek invited me to write something on what it takes to do effective brainstorming after they saw my post on Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal. I went back and re-read the academic research on brainstorming and remain amazed by how detached it is from what it actually happens when people and teams do creative work. I developed this argument and management guidelines in an article that just appeared in BusinessWeek’s Innovation and Design section. Check out Eight Tips for Better Brainstorming.
I would also like to add a point that isn’t covered in this article. Not all psychology experiments are irrelevant to what happens in organizations. I am a strong proponent of using experimental methods when they reflect either the fundamentals of human behavior or have some hope of reflecting what actually happens in the real world. For a superb example of how this can be done, check out Max Bazerman’s book Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. Unfortunately, the assumptions and methods that most brainstorming researchers use in their experiments produce rigorous evidence that is, unfortunately, of little relevance. This isn’t just my opinion. I made a presentation a few years ago about brainstorming to a room full of renowned experimentalists at the Stanford Psychology Department, which included Mark Lepper, Lee Ross, and Robert Zajonc. The group was even more vehement about how unrealistic brainstorming research was as a model for how group work and creative work actually is done in real places.
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