What I hear you saying is...

To the throngs of loyal WIYSI readers - apologies - I've been camped out at Maison Camino with our new addition.

Anyhow, a post from Andreessen about the problems with brainstorming has rousted me. He quotes, by extension of The Medici Effect:, a 1958 study on the process:

To their surprise, the researchers found that virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups.

Yes, yes, it is easy to malign brainstorming as a lowest-common-denominator of idea production. In the corporate tech parlance, even a mention generates eye-rolling faster than a request for TPS coversheets. Even the etymology of the word is suspect:

From dictionary.com
Origin: 1890–95; brain + storm; orig. a severe mental disturbance

Why would brainstorming in groups generate fewer "good" ideas than doing it as individuals? I think it's because the dynamics of a group-brainstorm are counter to human nature.

When presented with new ideas, our minds are invited to either accept or reject them. And anyone that has sat through a formal brainstorm session knows that overt rejection is against the rules. So when brainstorming, we must either be silent or accept someone else's additions to the growing list of group ideas.

When we tacitly reject, the silence leaves our minds in a state of unrest -- churning through the logical arguments against the offending idea -- restricting our ability to focus on creating the new ideas that the process is supposed to be fostering. However, when we agree, we are lulled into the natural conformity of group- think. Our subconscious sees a reasonably good idea, and is sated -- we aren't invited to challenge it.

So, IMO group brainstorming probably does yield fewer good results than the individual 'virtual' version, at least in principle. But the divide between principle and practicality is where things get messy...

Babies and bathwater
So is there any value in the group-brainstorm? Or should it be cast into the dungeon of mediocre creativity tools?

Actually, I think that there is: When the problem set crosses the lines of multiple disciplines and types of expertise, group brainstorming may produce fewer ideas, but those generated will be better.

Here is the hypothetical example used in the study that yielded better results in individual brainstorms:

[P]sychologists let groups of four people brainstorm about the practical benefits or difficulties that would arise if everyone had an extra thumb on each hand after next year.

This type of problem is generic to all of us that have hands. That is, most anyone should be able to come up with a list of the pros/cons of having an extra set of thumbs as the problem applies to our own individual lives. The output of these ideas will necessarily be both accurate (because it applies to each individual) and generic, and therefore, considered "good" because they are generally applicable. For the reasons I mentioned earlier, there is no way a group session pondering the same problem will be able to exceed this output.

But let's create another random but perhaps more practical hypothetical example than the extra thumbs. Let's say we must move a 50-foot solid Greek marble statue from Oakland to San Francisco at 6am on August 15th.

To devise a favorable outcome, who would you want in the discussion? I'd want the antiquities curator in charge of the piece, transport contractors familiar with moving heavy equipment, a structural engineer, a geologist, heck maybe even a meteorologist to give input on the fog that is likely to be an impediment on a Bay Area summer morning.

This would be quite an interesting challenge and discussion. But would separating this team into virtual rooms -- as the study suggests -- generate the necessary ideas needed to move this statue? The Magic 8-Ball says all signs point to "no". The geologist is going to need to hear the ideas from the structural engineer in order to temper his own input. The movers will want to understand how fog may adversely affect visibility when approaching the bay bridge, for example.

A group brainstorm among the different experts might be the only way to generate a functional level of idea generation and discussion.

The point?
This is a fundamental weakness in many studies of human creativity and knowledge transfer: The quality of the outcome so heavily depends on the context and situation of the human interaction that deductions about our behaviors based on simple control groups and scenarios (e.g. "extra thumbs") are dangerous because the resulting explanations are attractive but simplistic panaceas for problems that require a considerably more complex and in-depth treatment.

So I'm not willing to flush group-brainstorming down the drain quite yet. I think it has some pretty useful applications and requires more thought. So, if any of you want to get together to, err....

never mind.