Leadership Communication: Why Brainstorming Sessions Go Wrong
Posted on Fri, Feb 10, 2012
By Scott Weighart, Director of Learning and Development
Brainstorming exercises always sound like such great ideas. If you’ve received any leadership communication training, you’ve heard the drill countless times throughout your career: Working as a group, blurt out any idea that comes to your mind, and we’ll capture it on a flipchart. Let’s focus on generating possibilities…. And no matter what you do, never criticize or debate a proposed idea. You might just short-circuit the creative process altogether.
This process is positive, polite, and downright democratic.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. I just read an article called “Groupthink: The brainstorming myth” by Jonah Lehrer in the latest issue of The New Yorker. He describes how brainstorming has been an accepted practice since 1948, when an advertising agency executive celebrated the practice in a popular book.
As Lehrer describes, however, several decades of research has shown that brainstorming is actually quite ineffective as a tool of creativity. It’s far better to tell people that they should propose any idea that they want… but that they also should feel free to debate and critique any proposed ideas. In fact, debate and criticism force us to reassess our ideas and dig deeper to come up with the best possible alternatives. At times, understanding why an idea is off can be very helpful in coming up with the best answer.
Drawing from the article’s advice as well as my own experiences in executive consulting, here are some leadership communication tips to get the best ideas and decisions out of a group.
1. Bring together people with different perspectives
People with different backgrounds, functions, and personalities generate a broader range of possibilities. The ideal group would be a mix of some people who work together all the time while others who are relatively new to the mix. This creates a healthy balance of chemistry and novelty.
2. Give people some time to brainstorm individually in advance.
Lehrer found that a good tactic is to give people a problem or challenge in advance, and have them generate ideas on their own. Then you can bring them together to share ideas, debating them, and developing new ideas. The research indicates that this leads to the best results.
3. Challenge people’s ideas… but with a neutral tone
Our executive coach Sarah Woods is an authority on executive consulting and an excellent facilitator. One reason is that she will challenge you to flesh out your idea. If you propose an idea, she might say, “And what would that do?” or “So then what?” or "So they willl...?" This pushes you to dig deeper, and you’re game to do so because her tone is not judgmental or dismissive; it’s purely neutral. She’s forcing you to either refine or improve your idea… or to see its holes and abandon it expediently.
4. Really creative solutions are more likely when you bring in very different perspectives—even from other fields or disciplines.
Plenty of research supports the idea that groups benefit from looking at lessons from completely different industries. At a recent Speak Like a CEO Boot Camp, we had some real synergy because of a fascinating mix of participants. We had executive leaders from Fortune 500 companies, but we also had an entrepreneur of a small business in Canada. One of our partner pairs featured a supply chain management guru and a former NFL football coach… and they were amazed at how much they learned from each other!
In our work in executive consulting, we often get asked about communication that drives business results. One suggestion: The next time you need to come up with a creative solution to a business challenge or a way to move the needle forward with your revenues, by all means pull together a group and let them have at it.
For effective leadership communication, just remember to encourage some healthy, courteous debate and criticism. Sometimes you do need to generate some heat to shed the most possible light.