Brainstorming 2.0- Tips and Technology to make this painful exercise more productive

“A brainstorming session is designed to produce as many ideas as possible to solve the problem at hand. The key ground rule is to postpone all criticism and evaluation of ideas. The group simply invents ideas without pausing to consider whether they are good or bad, realistic or unrealistic. With those inhibitions removed, one idea should stimulate another, like firecrackers setting off one another. In a brainstorming session, people need not fear looking foolish since wild ideas are explicitly encouraged.” Getting to Yes

As described by Osborne and also recommended in “Getting to Yes”, after the initial session of generating as many ideas as possible without criticism, the group can then begin criticizing and analyzing the ideas to narrow the list down to a small subset for consideration.

I like the special emphasis on “no criticism allowed” a lot during this initial session and have used it many times. It takes intentional effort and explicit instructions at the beginning of the meeting, and the moderator must be ready to keep the team in check. However, even with this structure, we can still end up with the same frustrating problems outlined above, resulting in a worse outcome than if the team members had just done individual brainstorming sessions.

As a solution and as a hybrid model, Grant suggests shifting to a process called “brainwriting” that goes like this:

• The team is asked to generate ideas individually (emphasizing the important conclusion in many studies that people come up with more and better ideas solo and are less prone to the issues highlighted above).
• Ideas are pooled and then shared anonymously among the group, with each member evaluating them individually.
• The team then comes together to select and refine the most promising options.

The reason we shouldn’t just stop at the individual brainstorming step is nicely articulated in the article:

“Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity. But it doesn’t end there. Individuals produce a greater volume and variety of novel ideas when they work alone. That means that they come up with more brilliant ideas than groups—but also more terrible ideas than groups. It takes collective judgment to find the signal in the noise and bring the best ideas to fruition.”

I like this hybrid model a lot, and have used it with success. By giving the team the task and time in advance of the meeting, the final list of ideas turns out to be much more interesting and exhaustive than anything that could have been created in a group session.

Enter ChatGPT

A new and probably underutilized tool that has proven to be incredibly helpful in the brainstorming process is a LLM like ChatGPT. Like all tools, ChatGPT has its strengths and weaknesses. Ideation is one of the best uses for LLMs and in my opinion should be a daily tutor and brainstorming partner for anyone in business today. There is simply no better way to generate a large volume of ideas and information in such a short time, with the ability to have back-and-forth interactions to refine and explore topics. At a minimum these tools can help get one past the “blank screen” phase of ideation that keeps many of us from getting going. Even better is when they become a sounding board to help one think through innovative solutions to a problem, or quickly generate pros and cons of various approaches.

Where would chatGPT fit into the hybrid “brainwriting” model that Grant describes? I suggest when each team member is tasked with prepping a list of ideas to be pooled for the group review, the moderator recommends using chatgpt in creative ways to come up with the list, using individual experience and expertise to add to and refine the final product. Encourage your team to be using these tools! Later, after the ideas are pooled, they can be fed thru chatGPT for ranking, listing of pros/cons, and expansion of the list with other complementary ideas that may not have made it into the original pool but are suggested based on the aggregate. Yes, you’re going to get a few strange ideas and some hallucinations. However, unlike Michael Scott in The Office (see video below), we don’t trust the computer implicitly and drive into the lake.  We still have to evaluate the credibility of each ChatGPT recommendation, discarding the ones that don’t make sense, using ones that are helpful.  Sometimes the specific project will require too much domain expertise for a general LLM, but other times you’ll end up with a few winners. LLMs can do this ideation and processing of complex scenarios much faster than humans, and I think you’re missing out if you aren’t using them on a routine basis. 

Summary

Group brainstorming sessions have a much maligned history in the business world, and rightly so, but when done correctly are incredibly valuable to an organization.  New technological tools like ChatGPT are often underutilized in these exercises and have the potential to make them even more productive. In subsequent newsletters I’ll follow up with some thoughts from chatGPT on this topic, including a proposed framework, helpful prompts, and more.  We’ll also explore additional lesser-appreciated benefits to your team and organization when regular brainstorming sessions are conducted. Stay tuned!