Hi, I'm Dr. Tony McCaffrey. Brainstorming, the practice of sharing ideas while withholding judgment, rose to popularity in the early 1950s with the promise of producing more ideas. The problem is, it never worked.
No study has shown that brainstorming produces more ideas than people just working alone for a while and then coming together to share their ideas and build on them. It doesn't work because sharing one idea at a time, by talking no less, is incredibly inefficient. Further, extroverts always dominate introverts and hamper idea generation, even if you have a talented facilitator.
Brainswarming, an approach I pioneered with my colleagues, directly challenges the foundation of brainstorming by asking, why do we need to talk in the first place? This idea is probably best explained using an example from the lives of insects. Ants solve problems by leaving signals in their environment that influence the behavior of the others. When searching for food, successful ants leave traces of pheromones along their trails, a signal to the other ants that there's a path to dinner.
If we make a problem-solving graph, then humans can quietly leave their signals, that is, their ideas, for others to build upon. In a brain-swarming graph, The goal grows downward into refined sub-goals. Resources are interacted together and grow upward.
When the two directions connect, solutions start to emerge. Let's see how brainstorming would handle a classic management problem like this real-life conundrum at the company Pacific Power & Light. Winter storms in the Cascade Mountains leave power lines loaded with ice, which if left unattended will break the lines.
Having workers climb the poles to shake the lines is both dangerous and time-consuming. Management searched for a better method for years. What if they had used brain swarming?
To start, they would simply place the goal at the top of the brain swarming graph and a few known resources at the bottom. Then the group would be instructed not to talk, but to simply add post-it notes and drawn lines to the graph. People who are naturally top-down thinkers would start refining the goal. Other naturally bottom-up thinkers would analyze how the resources could be used, or they would add new resources. Pretty soon the two directions would connect, an indication that the group is finding ways to use the resources to solve the problem.
This figure shows a careful refinement of the goal. as well as Pacific Power and Light's actual solution of using the helicopter's downdraft to shake the lines enough to remove the ice. Other solutions are also shown, including using a helicopter to drop a de-icing agent onto the lines and using the conducted electricity to generate enough heat to melt the ice on the outside of the lines.
We don't know for sure whether using brainstorming would have helped Pacific Power and Light come up with an effective solution more quickly. But our pilot work shows that brainstorming produces up to 115 ideas in 15 minutes versus 100 ideas per hour for traditional brainstorming. By switching from talking to writing on a structured graph, brainstorming greatly improves the effectiveness of group work.