The Death of Brainstorming

Traditionally, brainstorming has served as the fount of innovation for organizations of all sizes across all industries. A group of employees gets together in a room to innovate out-of-the-box ideas around developing a new product, optimizing an existing process, or solving a challenging problem.

This technique has served as a brilliant diamond of creativity, working wonders to facilitate the innovative ideas that helped give birth to our modern world … or so goes the traditional narrative on brainstorming.

Recent research, however, has increasingly shown that this kind of brainstorming may be more like a cubic zirconia than a brilliant diamond. In fact, those studies showed that the supposed usefulness of brainstorming is misleading, and it may be less effective than the simpler technique of asking employees to come up with ideas on their own.

Moreover, our modern, post-pandemic workplace has led to a situation in which it’s increasingly difficult for business leaders to get employees into the same physical room to pursue brainstorming. More teams work in a distributed manner, either from workplaces across the globe or from home on their hybrid/remote days. Indeed, in the second quarter of 2024, less than one-third of companies (31%) required their corporate employees to work five days a week in the office, according to the Scoop Flex Index. And traditional brainstorming using remote tools is much more difficult than in-person brainstorming.

Given both the research on the surprisingly low effectiveness of brainstorming and the shrinking number of companies requiring full-time, in-office work, it’s time to announce the death of brainstorming as the primary tool for innovation. Instead, HR leaders need to rely on a combination of behavioral science and digital technology to help their companies pursue innovation for competitive advantage in the modern world.

Innovation in Distributed Teams

Many leaders are skeptical that true innovation is possible in distributed teams. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said the rise of remote work has undermined innovation, claiming that “one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes” was believing that you “didn’t need to be together in person and … there was going to be no loss of creativity.”

The narrative that traditional, in-person work environments offer the sole breeding grounds for innovation has dominated the discourse. In reality, this narrative is not only outdated but fundamentally flawed in today’s technologically driven world.

Consider a new study in the prominent scientific journal Nature. This comprehensive analysis spearheaded by a team of researchers from Oxford University and the University of Pittsburgh delved into a staggering expanse of data—over 20 million scientific studies and 4 million patent applications spanning a half-century.

Analyzing trends from the 1980s to the present, the data revealed a fascinating narrative: The once-wide chasm between the innovative outputs of in-person and distributed teams has been steadily narrowing.

The 1980s marked the debut of the first scientific distributed collaboration platform. Back then, the data hinted at a somewhat bleak picture for distributed teams. They faced a 5% innovation deficit compared to their in-person counterparts. It was as if distributed collaboration carried an invisible 5% tax on creativity and breakthroughs.

As we fast-forwarded into the new millennium, the landscape began to shift. Between 2000 and 2010, this innovation gap dwindled down to a mere 1%, indicating that the barriers once posed by physical distance are gradually losing their grip. That period witnessed the birth and rapid adoption of technologies tailor-made for distributed collaboration, such as Trello, Zoom, Google Drive, and Slack.

But the real plot twist emerged post-2015. In this period, the narrative flipped completely. The once-negative coefficient, a marker of the distributed work disadvantage, not only zeroed out but took a surprising leap into positive territory. It’s a remarkable turnaround, a testament to the evolving efficacy of distributed collaboration.

The studies underscore the crucial role played by robust internet connectivity in enabling and enhancing distributed collaboration. Specifically, teams whose members had better broadband connectivity experienced improved outcomes on innovation. That evidence further supports the idea that refinements in distributed work tech tools—which are enabled by fast broadband—offer the key to improved innovation.

Traditional Brainstorming: Benefits and Challenges

Traditional face-to-face whiteboard brainstorming sessions may feel super productive, but numerous studies have shown that this format is substantially worse for producing innovative ideas than even individuals coming up with ideas separately, not to mention alternative and more-effective best practices.

Behavioral science research has revealed that participants in traditional brainstorming sessions enjoy them and believe them to be effective for generating ideas. That comes from two areas identified by scientists:

• Idea synergy, meaning that ideas shared by one participant help trigger ideas in other participants. Experiments show that synergy benefits are especially high if participants are instructed to pay attention to the ideas of others and focus on being inspired by these ideas.
• Social facilitation, meaning the benefit of social support from working on a shared task. Participants feel motivated when they know they’re collaborating with their peers on the same goal.

Sadly, these benefits of brainstorming come with costs attached. One of the biggest problems is called production blocking.

Did you ever participate in a brainstorming session during which you had what you felt to be a brilliant idea, but someone else was talking? Then, the next person responded and took the conversation in a different direction. By the time you had a chance to speak, the idea seemed not relevant or too redundant, or maybe you even forgot it.

If that has never happened to you, you’re likely an extrovert. Introverts have a lot of difficulty with production blocking. It’s harder for them to formulate ideas in an environment of team brainstorming. They generally think better in a quiet environment, by themselves or with one other person at most. And they have difficulty interrupting a stream of conversation, making it more likely for their idea to remain unstated.

Those with a more pessimistic than optimistic personality also struggle with brainstorming. Optimists tend to process verbally, spit-balling half-baked ideas on the fly. That’s perfect for traditional brainstorming. By contrast, pessimists generally process internally. They feel the need to think through their ideas to make sure they don’t have flaws. Although brainstorming explicitly permits flawed ideas, it’s hard for pessimists to overcome their personality, just like it’s hard for introverts to generate ideas in a noisy team setting.

Pessimists are also powerfully impacted by a second major problem for traditional brainstorming: evaluation apprehension. Many pessimists feel worried about sharing their ideas openly due to social anxiety about what their peers may think.

Finally, more-junior or lower-status team members often feel reluctant to share controversial ideas that challenge existing practices or the territory associated with high-status team members. Those ideas are often the most innovative, but they remain unsaid, whether due to production blocking or evaluation apprehension.

Using Behavioral Science to Improve Traditional Brainstorming

In the early 1990s—long before the rise of distributed work—researchers concerned with the faults of traditional brainstorming worked on developing new techniques. In working with clients to help them adapt to distributed and flexible work models, I used recent advances in behavioral science to adapt these techniques to the modern workplace through what I call “asynchronous brainstorming.”

This process starts with selecting digital collaboration tools. Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, ideal for anonymous text-based idea submissions, and MURAL, a virtual whiteboard suitable for visual brainstorming, stand out as prime examples. Here are the three steps: (See box for a case study of asynchronous brainstorming below):

STEP 1: Use digital collaboration tools to input ideas. Teams may opt for real-time virtual collaboration, in which participants first have a brief discussion via a video conferencing tool and then input their ideas into the chosen digital collaboration platform, tapping social facilitation. More frequently, they use an asynchronous approach, which allows team members to add ideas independently by a set deadline, catering to different time zones and thinking styles.

In either case, the use of the digital collaboration tool addresses the potential problem of production blocking. Moreover, you can allow participants to submit ideas anonymously, which addresses the problem of evaluation apprehension.

STEP 2: Evaluate and provide feedback. In the second step, the brainstorming meeting facilitator accesses the back end of the collaboration platform, removes duplicates, combines similar ideas, breaks ideas up into categories, and sends them out to all team members. Following this, the team engages in evaluating and providing feedback on the ideas.

Anonymous methods for commenting, rating, or voting foster an unbiased assessment based on criteria such as novelty, practicality, and usefulness, again preventing the problem of evaluation apprehension.

STEP 3: Discuss and finalize ideas. The process culminates in this third step. Widely distributed teams might convene in a follow-up video call for this stage, while teams that are in close enough physical proximity would benefit from an in-person meeting to finalize discussions. Implementing the selected ideas and assigning follow-up tasks ensures that the brainstorming session translates into actionable projects.

The key strengths of asynchronous brainstorming include its inclusivity, its capacity to elicit a wide range of ideas, and its flexibility. By removing evaluation apprehension and production blocking, the technique accommodates introverts, pessimists, and junior/lower-status team members. This approach is an effective method for fostering innovation in all workplaces, whether for distributed teams or even fully in-person teams.