The myth of brainstorming
Reflecting on the evolving nature of the creative process.
I have always been terrible at brainstorming. Since I was in college, this was a latent worry I had about potential hurdles I would face once I entered the field. I was quite shy in design school, and never felt comfortable speaking in group sessions, often opting for side conversations with classmates if I had feedback to give or seek. I knew the professional world would be structured around teams. I assumed life in a design team would be full of brainstorming sessions — mythical, lively, fast-paced meetings with brilliant ideas bouncing off multiple heads until they were captured in someone’s notebook as shiny kernels of greatness. There would be roars of celebration and laughter, hugs and high-fives, uproarious chants. I feared I’d be the guy in the corner quietly admiring the scene, nervously slipping into a numb silence if someone asked me for my two cents. Still, I was eager and curious to learn, curious to one day brainstorm like a “real” designer.
In my first job, at Pentagram, like most designers out of school, most conceptual development was off-limits to me, so the hunt for these sessions remained elusive through my first few months. As time passed, and I began working on more and more projects, a certain workflow emerged in the team that never employed any brainstorming exercises, or at least as I had pictured while reading through Alex Osborne’s methods lists in my dorm room. At first, I was concerned about this (“How am I ever going to learn to brainstorm?! I’m doomed!), but this seemed not to matter. Our team got work done without the need of these by-the-book sessions. Those communal idea-generating sessions never really materialized.
As it turns out, this was probably a good thing. The notion of brainstorming and its misconceptions have now been widely debunked. Still, I first encountered these contradictions later in my career, from an article by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker. His work reduced brainstorming to little more than workplace therapy — a practice that results in a few easy answers shouted by eager vocal leaders, but not much else.
The two essential ingredients associated with classic brainstorming — free associations and a judgment-free environment — seem to be the primary flaws. The problem with the former is that most people are really bad at free associations. Quoting a study by Charlan Nemeth, a professor at UC Berkeley, Lehrer wrote, “…the vast majority of these associations were utterly predictable. Even the most creative people are still going to come up with many mundane associations.” As far as the judgment-free structure of brainstorming? Nemeth continues, “While ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the necessary instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but stimulate them relative to every other condition.” Despite the myth of quick thinking and forgiving attitudes, the brain thrives when given more time and when encountering dissent. Brainstorming may be a good morale-boosting exercise, but not necessarily a practice that leads to better ideas.
However, this does not take away from the importance of using groups to improve your ideas. At Pentagram, instead of brainstorming, we’d go over a project as a group to discuss deadlines, creative briefs, research, and client goals. But we didn’t talk about specific visual solutions. That was up to us to figure out on our own. With this workflow, I began to get comfortable with my intuitive process. I started sketching alone, as I always did back in school, sometimes doodling at home or on the bus, to make sure I had something ready to show or develop when I got into the office. When we got together as a group, we’d talk about ideas as concrete potential solutions — not just vague notions pulled out of thin air — then go back to improve them individually, integrating everything we heard. We did not wait for the group to gather to generate ideas — the ideas came with us to each session, and were concretely reiterated for each subsequent discussion.
When we launched studio1500, both my partner Erik and I continued this way of working, right from our first studio project — our business cards. We both did some studies independently, then got together one weekend to discuss them. There were some interesting directions, but nothing that felt right quite yet. Then we started just talking, messing around on a laptop, almost mindlessly. We started going off-topic a bit, talking about typeface and color options. Somehow, we brought up Richard Serra, and his verb list, which led to talking about how we both valued the act of tangible results in design, doing vs. thinking about doing, and the role of action in design in general, and we thought, why not work with that? We did some more studies and, in about half an hour, we were done.
There were no rules in that little session, no “no bad ideas” moderators. It was just a casual chat. We just reacted to each other’s work with more work. Of course, an element of free association was there in the winding path that led us to remember Serra’s work, but it was a natural off-shoot, not a staged exercise. We had no post-its to capture our remarks, just a sketchbook, and a laptop nearby to get to work when something begged pursuit.
This process became part of our ethos, a normal aspect of how we approach our work. When we get a project, we talk about it, then we go off and come back days later to look at what each other did. Then the work evolves, as looking at each other’s work inevitably spurs other thoughts. On the best days, the ensuing iteration is better than the ones that came prior. Then we separate again and continue the process until we have what we want to present. (Or until we just run out of time, whichever comes first). But, like the team at Pentagram, we always bring concrete work to discuss in our group discussions. We don’t make progress if there aren’t already ideas on the table — like a potluck, you don’t come in empty-handed.
I like to think that this is the feeling Osborne had in mind when the “Brainstorming” term came to him, that he wanted to capture that sense of creation in a group setting and outline it for others to share. It’s a valiant effort. But, like with the standardization and dissemination of Design Thinking practices since then, the attempt to codify an intuitive creative practice neglects a great deal about the inherent importance of not codifying an intuitive process. The importance of letting people find their way and acknowledging the multitude of ways there are to develop ideas.
As Lehrer continued: “The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions….when the composition of the group is right — enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways — the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process.”
Iwould be remiss not to point out the troubles that Lehrer faced after that peak of visibility around the time the New Yorker article came out, but the research behind his conclusions is still sound. Brainstorming has been challenged in articles like these, and these, and they all lead to the same conclusion: “Individuals generate more, diverse, unique ideas than groups following Osborn’s rules of brainstorming.”
But there is a lot we can glean from the basic structure. Most notably, we can look at the work of Leigh Thompson, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who has since brought many powerful ideas to the table about how to improve brainstorming. The most intriguing of which is referred to as “BrainWriting,” and it emphasizes the need for participants to “brainstorm” individually before gathering with a larger group, quietly writing down their ideas ahead of time, emphasizing the Quantity of ideas over Quality in the early going of an ideation process. Of course, this was what we have been doing all along; we just didn’t have a name for it. We just called it work.
The biggest takeaway for me, now with many years of hindsight, is how important it is to simply know when to work alone and when to engage a group. The absence of “brainstorming skills” isn’t an indication of a bad design approach. It just means that a process has adapted — knowingly or not — to how the brain works. The work of creating is still work, and some parts are your responsibility, and some parts cannot be done without others. Ideas do not come out of one brainstorming session or two or three hundred. Coming up with ideas is, in fact, rarely a dramatic event. Ideas often arrive in quiet moments, away from all those high fives and group chants that never actually materialize.
This is something I stress to my students a lot. Generating ideas in design is a skill, not unlike writing or playing guitar. Getting better takes practice and errors and time and more time. And undoubtedly there’s a spectrum — all the practice in the world might not turn you into Jimi Hendrix or William Faulkner — but you can still get pretty good. The pitfall of the aura of terms like “brainstorming” is that it lulls people into seeing these formulas as ready-made solutions, as appealing shortcuts where none exist. The long way is the only way sometimes, and you often have to find it on your own.
The fears I had as a student of sucking at “brainstorming” have long subsided. True, I still cringe a little when students or clients utter the word, but not too much. Most people don’t mean it literally. Most people simply mean they want to chat or run things by us. When I hear the term now, I simply get ready to talk, walk through things, and ramble a bit as needed — generally, with a rough idea or two already stuffed in my back pocket, ready to get to work.
