If yous work in an part, your boss has probably forced you into a brainstorming session or two (or 12). Brainstorming, after all, is supposedly a killer way to come up upward with ideas, and businesses want to take advantage of all that collective creativity. But information technology turns out that brainstorming is actually a terrible technique—in fact, people generate fewer good ideas when they brainstorm together than when they piece of work alone. Thankfully, at that place'southward a better way: a technique called brainwriting (retrieve brainstorming, but with a pen and paper and less chitchat). And in a new written report, researchers tested out variations of this method to empathise exactly how to help people come upwardly with their all-time ideas.

Flickr user Alexander Lyubavin

Why Brainstorming Doesn't Work
The erstwhile brainstorming method infiltrated the American workplace over one-half a century ago, after an advertising executive named Alex F. Osborn coined the method in the 1940s. As companies all over the country adopted the method, psychologists started to wonder: Does brainstorming actually piece of work? Many scientific studies later, they had their answer: a resounding no. Study after study found that people who use this grouping technique produce fewer good ideas than those who ideate alone.

This is surprising, since researchers take also seen that group interaction helps people build on each other's thoughts and stimulate new ideas they hadn't considered before. But group brainstorming has many downsides—chief amongst them is that only a unmarried person can talk at a time, which means that i or two people tin dominate the chat. It too means that while someone is sharing his idea, others might forget their own ideas or the grouping may become fixated on the ideas people already shared. "Brainstorming is a complex process where people are trying to heed, think, add together, collaborate, build," says Paul Paulus, a professor psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. "It'due south cumbersome, it'south difficult psychologically, and people don't do information technology very well." The end upshot is that brainstorming does the exact opposite of what it'southward supposed to practise.

Flickr user Markus Spiske

A Smart Culling To Brainstorming
Once scientists realized brainstorming didn't work, they started looking at other methods of idea generation—ones that took better advantage of group collaboration. As Fine art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, explains, "Information technology'southward not that people working together are never good, it's just that the technique that Osborn developed was lousy."

Over the past 20 years, researchers take discovered a collection of group techniques that they've constitute are more effective than both brainstorming and working alone. One of the best ones they've devised is brainwriting—it's a kind of like brainstorming, except that group members write their ideas on pieces of paper instead of sharing out loud. People then laissez passer those sheets of paper around the group and read each other's ideas while they proceed to write downward their ain ideas. This method allows the kind of group interaction that'south effective (i.e., sharing ideas and building on them), while avoiding the pitfalls of face-to-confront brainstorming.

Flickr user Alexander Lyubavin

The Prove For Brainwriting
While many researchers accept already studied brainwriting, none has studied it in an actual workplace. And so in a recent report, published in Human being Factors and Ergonomics Society, Paul Paulus and his team tested the brainwriting technique in a existent-world part—they worked with employees at a tech visitor that's rated amongst the elevation twenty businesses in the earth. Simply Paulus wasn't only interested in whether brainwriting worked or not—he besides wanted to know if at that place's a certain way of doing brainwriting to maximize the number of good ideas people think upwardly. So the researchers organized 57 employees—mostly engineers and estimator scientists—into different groups. In one trial, they had some participants brainwrite in groups then brainstorm alone, while the other participants first worked solitary, then did brainwriting in groups. Using the initial session, Paulus could test whether people came up with more ideas while brainwriting or working in isolation. And by combining two ideation sessions, he could study what's the best way to do brainwriting: working in a group first and then solitary, or vice versa.

Ultimately, the researchers found that if you simply had ii options—to work in a brainwriting group or work alone—you're ameliorate off in a group. The brainwriters came up with 37% more ideas than the loners. The team also discovered that if people did brainwriting in groups and so brainstormed on their own, they produced more good ideas than when they did the reverse scenario (i.e., working lone, so group brainwriting). "We've found that what happens is in one case you lot've been in a group for a while, interacting and sharing ideas, so you're alone, there's a big jump in your inventiveness," Paulus says. "That'south often when the greatest ideas come." He notes that the solitary reflection time should happen quickly afterwards a group session. "If you take too much time, you tend to lose all that stimulation—all that brain activity dissipates," he says.

In a 2nd experiment, with the aforementioned 57 employees, Paulus and his team tried out asynchronous brainwriting—that is, switching multiple times betwixt group brainwriting and working alone. For the command grouping, they had some participants do normal group brainwriting without alternating. The other participants rotated between 8-minute individual writing sessions and 3-infinitesimal grouping sessions, where group members read over each other's ideas. The researchers institute that the asynchronous method worked much meliorate—people who alternated techniques idea of .fifty ideas a minute versus .29 ideas a infinitesimal in group-only brainwriting. Paulus says that it makes sense why switching between group interaction and working lone might work best. "Alone, you lot never get other people's ideas. And if you're in a grouping all the time, you may spend more time thinking nigh other people's ideas than your own," he says. And then you get the all-time of both worlds if you lot combine the ii.

Flickr user Alexander Lyubavin

The Caveat
Since the sample size was then small, many of the findings weren't statistically meaning (except for the asynchronous brainwriting trial). But co-ordinate to Paulus and other scientists, this is typical for studies in real-globe workplace environments because it's difficult to recruit enough participants compared to a lab experiment. Paulus'south study is still an important contribution, especially since other researchers have already found that brainwriting is an effective method. "The of import thing is that this was a real company with real people, working on real ideas, and nosotros got many more ideas of out them," says Paulus. "So practically, information technology was significant." Leigh Thompson, a professor of direction and organizations at Northwestern University, agrees (she was not involved in the study). "They've given usa more than confidence than what has been plant in the lab can be meaningfully applied in the existent business globe," she says.

It'southward yet more than evidence that you and anybody else in your part needs to stop brainstorming and start brainwriting. Or as Paulus explains information technology, "Just considering you throw people together doesn't mean wonderful things happen. Information technology has to happen in the right way."

Mark Wilson and Diana Budds discuss the ineffectiveness of brainstorming