Brainstorming for Grown-Ups

Brainstorming is that thing that elementary school kids learn about so that they can develop their creative abilities and learn the value of working in small groups, right?

In my almost 8 years of teaching in the college classroom, I have never met students who either understood how brainstorming works or who were willing to engage in an actual brainstorming session. My findings continue to hold true despite the fact that I now work primarily with highly intelligent people who work in very successful businesses.

My non-scientific assessment of the problem is that many people don't trust that the effort will have sufficient rewards and others simply don't feel comfortable with the kind vulnerability required to throw out seemingly off-the-wall ideas to a group of their peers.

This topic has been on my mind for a while, but the importance of it was really cemented by a brainstorming session that Libby and I had last week when we were preparing a proposal for one of our clients. It was not planned and it happened in a very noisy Starbucks, but it worked.

I then ran across this article by Malcolm Gladwell and found my thoughts coming into focus. Gladwell's article follows dinosaur enthusiast and former high-level Microsoft researcher, Nathan Myhrvold, in his quest to literally generate insight. He's not so much interested in developing new technologies or products, his goal is to think them up. He started a company called Intellectual Ventures, hired the smartest people he knew, and then started having them get together for "invention sessions."

What I found fascinating is that these "invention sessions" are really just brainstorming sessions among remarkably intelligent and accomplished people. Here are a few things about brainstorming sessions that I have gleaned from the article:

1. They are informal sessions with no clear-cut goal: "There really aren't any rules . . . We may start out talking about refined plastics and end up talking about shoes, and that's O.K." These guys meet at the offices of Intellectual Ventures, but they also do things like talking over dinner. Notes Lowell Wood, who was a new member of the team: "We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging thirty-six different inventions from dinner. Dinner."

2. They are meetings of individuals with a wide array of interest and expertise: A chemist, a neurosurgeon, a physicist, a couple of former Microsoft researchers, an electrical engineer, an attorney -- these are the backgrounds of some of the members of Myhrvold's team.

Gladwell notes, "They had different backgrounds and temperaments and perspectives, and if you gave them something to think about that they did not ordinarily think about—like hurricanes, or jet engines, or metastatic cancer—you were guaranteed a fresh set of eyes."

It's a great idea to get all of your colleagues, who do the same job and think about the same things, together for a brainstorming session. But, just imagine what might come out if you threw in a few wild cards . . .

3. They are the result of a great deal of knowledge and research: Despite the fact that these sessions lack a guiding outcome or structure, they are not simply a spur-of-the-moment occurrence, either. When the group is working on a particular topic or idea, they spend weeks doing research about what is already known and what is thought to be possible. They bring their informed opinions to the meetings and use them to build new ideas. This is how synergy happens.

It makes me realize that the brainstorming session that Libby and I had about how to structure our new Get Smart program could not have happened even a year ago. At that point, I knew too little about the industries with which we work to really be a good sounding board. I had to know what I was talking about before I could be a really useful brainstorming partner. But, the funny thing is that, every time we do this brainstorming stuff, we come up with something that really works. Or, as Gladwell points out: "Good ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them, which is how a group of people can sit down to dinner, put their minds to it, and end up with eight single-spaced pages of ideas."