Bob Sutton has an article in Business Week online, Eight Tips for Better Brainstorming, about how real companies get real value from various creativity practices:
“badly managed face-to-face brainstorms do stifle creativity and … even when brainstorming is done right, people probably can still generate ideas faster when they work alone. But it is total nonsense to … keep your people in solitary confinement where they can’t ‘waste time’ listening to and building on the ideas of others.”
His conclusions are based on lots of research with real companies like IDEO and SAP. One of his key observations is that most academic research on brainstorming is useless when applied to the real world – the experimental subjects don’t know anything about brainstorming and don’t care about the goal:
“These brainstorming virgins (usually undergraduates in psychology classes) are briefly presented a list of rules and are then instructed to spend 10 or 15 minutes generating novel ideas about topics that they know and most likely care nothing about.”
In particular, real organizations use group creativity in intimate combination with individual creativity. His first rule is “1. Use brainstorming to combine and extend ideas, not just to harvest ideas.”
Excellent reading (as is anything from Sutton).
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