Brainstorming
Brainstorming
What is brainstorming?
- An ideation technique that defers criticism and aims for quantity
- 4 principles: no criticism, free-wheeling, quantity, combination
- Offset with variants such as brainwriting
What brainstorming actually changes in a meeting is not participants’ talent for ideas but when judgment steps in. In an ordinary meeting, the moment someone speaks, the critics of cost, schedule, and precedent jump in, and people who anticipate that reaction never speak up at all. Putting a time wall between divergence and convergence lets half-formed thoughts come out, and the meeting shifts from confirming conclusions to gathering raw material. That is why writing 40 minutes of divergence and 20 minutes of convergence into the agenda, minute by minute, works far better than repeating the principle as a slogan.
Rules of thumb for running a session have settled through experience. Groups of 5 to 7 people, sessions of 60 to 90 minutes, and a single ideation question tend to work best for both output and focus. As groups grow, so does production blocking: while one person speaks, everyone else forgets their own ideas. To avoid this, teams mix in methods that put writing before talking, such as 6-3-5 brainwriting, in which 6 people each write 3 ideas and pass the paper every 5 minutes, and the nominal group technique, in which everyone writes first and then shares one idea at a time in turn. Delphi has a different purpose: it circulates expert opinions anonymously over several rounds. Delphi narrows toward consensus; brainstorming widens the set of options.
The point that breaks most often in practice is mistaking the ban on criticism for a rule for the entire meeting. If people keep deferring evaluation after divergence ends, to protect the mood, the session finishes with 200 sticky notes on the wall and no one looks at them again the following week. The ban on criticism is a temporary rule that applies only to the divergence phase; in the convergence phase you need to apply criteria and cut boldly. Another is the habit of an executive setting the direction with the first remark: once that sentence is spoken, most later ideas cluster as variations on it. A single rule that senior people write but do not speak during the first 10 minutes of divergence greatly widens the range of output.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Okgum LeeExpert in corporate analysis, fundraising, and business planningAlex F. Osborn, co-founder of the American advertising agency BBDO, systematized the group ideation meetings he practiced in-house and established them as brainstorming, with its four principles, in his 1953 book “Applied Imagination.”
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a household goods manufacturer with 210 employees and KRW 34 billion (≈ US$25,437,700) in annual revenue, had gone three years without launching a new product that topped KRW 1 billion (≈ US$748,200) in sales. Recordings of its planning meetings showed that team leaders and above accounted for 78% of all speaking time, while junior staff spoke for an average of 2 minutes each. The company decided to run a weekly ideation workshop for 6 weeks.
- Kim, the team leader of the new product planning team, opened the first session with a single question, “How can we get single-person households to use detergent in 3 seconds?”, and stated up front that for the first 40 of the 60 minutes, no evaluation of any kind would be allowed.
- They split into 3 groups of 6 and ran 6-3-5 brainwriting. Over 30 minutes of passing papers to the next person every 5 minutes, 324 ideas piled up, and junior staff produced 1.4 times as many as team leaders.
- When the division head cut in with “That doesn’t work cost-wise,” Park, the HR manager facilitating the session, said “This is no-judgment time” and handed over a sticky note in place of a comment.
- In the convergence phase, the team merged 324 cards into 28 clusters, plotted them on a matrix of implementation difficulty versus customer response, and then used dot voting with 3 votes per person to narrow them down to the final 6.
- Of the 6 ideas, 2 moved on to the prototype stage and launched 4 months later. Team-leader share of speaking time in planning meetings fell from 78% to 41%, and meeting length dropped from an average of 90 minutes to 55.