Ditch the Brainstorm

Especially in a retrospective.

What is it

Brainstorming has been around since the 1940s, when Alex Osborn, an ad executive, shared his process for generating ideas. Alex was seen as a paragon of the company’s success and announced that the approach would increase productivity by over 50%, so the method spread wildly.

The steps are straightforward:

1. As a group, generate as many ideas as you can.
2. Prioritise the list, paying special focus to unusual or novel items.
3. Combine and refine.
4. Don’t criticise.

The intention is to leverage the power of the group mentality in order to maximise the volume of quality ideas generated.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.

Why it sucks

The debate around brainstorming has been quietly raging for decade, but even now I see people running retrospectives using this technique. I get it, it feels like a cheap way of generating inclusivity and high value ideas. The issue is that we’ve actually know for a long time that it actually does the opposite.

Research done by Mullen, Johnson and Salas¹ in 2010 collated results from dozens of studies into brainstorming, and clearly showed that it produced fewer quality ideas than simply getting everyone to work independently.

There have been plenty of reasons that people have cited for this, but I like the brevity of 4 listed by HBR in 2015².

1. Social Loafing — Playing the bystander while others contribute.
2. Social Anxiety — Feeling concerned over the quality of our own ideas.
3. Regression to the mean — The quality tending to the average of the group.
4. Production Blocking — Forcing people to stall their output while waiting for others to share their ideas.

I would actually add one more here.

5. Circling the Drain — When someone shares an idea, it may spark another in you. However, I often notice that these ideas will be related. The further this spark spreads through the group, the lower the quality or more outlandish it becomes.

For a deeper dive into why brainstorms aren’t effective, I’d recommend Thompson’s 2013 summary³.

Why it’s bad for Retrospectives

Brainstorms are a particularly heinous way of conducting ideation in a retrospective because it is fundamentally the wrong type of exercise. Meetings in general, and retrospectives in particular, follow a certain flow. You begin with a divergent phase where ideas are generated, explore them more fully in an emergent phase, and then collapse onto a smaller number of quality options in a final convergent phase.

Brainstorms are often used at the start of a retrospective to generate initial ideas, or during a central phase to spark options, but they are inherently both divergent and convergent. Yes, you generate ideas, but you also revolve around specific ideas already generated. See ‘Regression to the mean’ and ‘Circling the drain’ above.

Looking at the phases above, we can see that the only valid place for a brainstorm to actually be used is at the end of a retrospective, but we still have the other failures to contend with even then.

What to do instead

There are myriad options for idea generation in any meeting, just flick through Retromat⁴ to find plenty of options.

However, there’s an easy drop in that should instantly help. It’s called brainwriting⁵. It was introduced in 1969 as Method-635 by Bernd Rohrbach. the process is equally as straightforward.

1. Collect a small group of domain experts, (The original method called for 6), and provide them each a piece of paper.
2. Give the group 5 minutes to write down 3 ideas.
3. Pass the paper to a neighbour
4. Allow a further 5 minutes to generate 3 ideas
5. Continue with the remainder of the group.

The beauty of this approach is that we are not constrained by the above limitations of brainstorming, each participant generates ideas in silence, resulting in over 100 possibilities.

• Nobody socially loafed.
• Nobody was limited by their social anxiety of speaking aloud.
• We had no reference mean to regress to.
• No one was blocked from generating ideas by another.
• There was no drain circling around specific ideas.

Just dropping this in as a replacement for brainstorming should immediately help the group produce more, and higher quality ideas.

As a final step to this process, I would suggest adding a prioritisation technique in order to choose a small number of high value items. Either get each participant to choose 3 items from their sheet, or bring the whole lot together. From here, you can use any quick method to achieve cohesion. Consider dot voting, chaos cocktail party, silent prioritisation, or anything else you have in your toolkit.

Let me know how you get on.

¹ Mullen, Johnson, Salas (2010). Tandfonline.com. Retrieved 30 July 2018, from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15324834basp1201_1?journalCode=hbas20

² Why Group Brainstorming Is a Waste of Time. (2015). Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 30 July 2018, from https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time

³ Thompson, Leigh. Creative conspiracy: The new rules of breakthrough collaboration. Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.

⁴ Retromat: Lean Analysis Meeting. (2018). Retromat.org. Retrieved 30 July 2018, from https://retromat.org/en/?id=52-86-105-73-57

⁵ Rohrbach, Bernd (1969). “Kreativ nach Regeln — Methode 635, eine neue Technik zum Lösen von Problemen”. (Creative by rules — Method 635, a new technique for solving problems)”. Absatzwirtschaft. 12: 73–75