Where did Brainstorming come from?
Brainstorming is a creative process, but it doesn’t breathe innovation. That is a sentence that I’ve found myself subconsciously preaching on repeat to myself on countless occasions over the last 20 years. I made a choice and a promise to myself, over those years, to explore creativity, how’s its mutated, how its been misunderstood, and how its been horrifically mangled in definition.
“Brainstorming is a creative process, but it doesn’t breathe innovation.“
I’ve searched for the best ways to make it work. I’ve also avoided holding an expectation on creativity. I know you can’t expect it to present itself among processes that aren’t set up to make it pliable.
Most of my friends and colleagues know I’m creative. My personal inbox gets flooded with requests from fellow professionals explaining personal situations to me in great detail and then tagging on a general statement of, “What do you think?” …as if asking such a question is going to return a simple explainable answer. Ironically, asking me that question, in a sense, is a form of brainstorming.
“What do you think?”
Sitting down to those messages and emails, I’m presented with a task that I wish I could close out with a reply, however, in posing such a short question, they’re feeding me with an open possibility. That question summarizes a problem. Being vague in nature, it allows me, without many bounds, use my own creative process try and come up with a solution for them. That solution is hopeful to become something that they wouldn’t necessarily have come up with before, because the only rules placed on it are in such a short question. Thus the answer is on my terms, born of my experiences and plays by my own personal rules.
So, yes, that is what you call brainstorming.
Yet, somehow the brainstorming that most of us have been exposed to is one that involves meetings of people in stale rooms, with or without adorning hotel art, forced on the viewer instead of meant to inspire, all locked in with demanded focus for a specified amount of time. Usually 15-45 minutes, with enough time to let someone or all jot down notes, or doodles. Let’s face it, we take more text notes than doodles but that’s another problem.
Throughout the last 20 years, we’ve been told that brainstorming, as groups, on a schedule is what makes innovation happens. In reality that couldn’t be more false. Groups reassure existing ideas not new ones.
“Groups reassure existing ideas not new ones.”
One of my favorite examples of innovation, one that directly influenced my adolescent growth, as a young engineer, in college, was a scene in a movie series From the Earth to the Moon. In the scene, I fondly remember, NASA engineers are tasked with the challenge to find out how to fit a square pack into a round hole.
The problem was that a filters for both of the lunar landing and command modules were different. They require different sizes and shapes of filters and for the Apollo 11 mission they had to make one filter fit into the other in order to stay in the capsule for an extended amount of time. It was a last resort option that they had never planned for.
“How do we fix this problem?”
In the scene, engineers looked down at a table with every spare part that was available to the astronauts and together they brainstormed an answer to the question, “how do we fix this problem?” THAT meeting was a great example of real brainstorming as a group. I can tell you that it was one of those moments that I always wish I’d have the opportunity to witness and experience in my own version during some moment of my career. I’ve to had one as theatrical but there have been a lot of similar mini moments.
The thing is, that event, as I saw it, as it was written to be viewed, filmed, and performed, was portrayed as it happened in Hollywood. As a filmmaker, myself, I know that in reality what I saw on the screen was not what happened in real life. I would like to think that someone poured a box of parts onto a table and said “what the hell can we do?” like it was a stack of Legos. But in reality, I know that’s probably not what actually happened. It was probably much more stressful, involved a lot of yelling, and coffee, and some overloading employee telling the others his best idea and how they were going to make it work. It’s possible that back then, brainstorming could have been as intended, that possibly it’s what engineering was like, then, but I’ve learned it probably wasn’t. IF I’m being hopeful and wishfully thinking they once had the freedom to imagine and propose ideas without strategic rules, its possible that there was time where there might’ve been more opportunity for creativity back then. as we had less and less processes to hold us down to a strict way of thinking. Strict processes kill creativity.
“Strict processes kill creativity”
By now, if you stumbled across my blog, or know me in really life, you know how and why brainstorming is so important to me. You’ll also understand why I value it as part of the creative process, and why it’s always frustrated me that we use the term brainstorming incorrectly. Its basic creative sacrilege to do so.
Ironically, recently, as I am writing this article, I’ve started to notice instances where brainstorming worked in a group setting, in small heaps for short moments. As it was going down, I was flabbergasted. I felt the ironic smirk go across my face as I realized it was possible. The possibility then leading me to fear we’d get caught for going rogue.
I can also tell you, if you’ve ever listened to me talk in a group saying about creativity, I preach that the true brainstorming, the true creator process happens in ONE single person‘s head. This is because our brain is a creative computer that works almost subconsciously, even without knowing sometimes. And then it brainstorms on its own as a closed system. That’s why brainstorming as a group is so difficult. We bring in so many other factors onto the table that actually make it harder for each of our creative computers to process and function. That’s additionally why group brainstorming doesn’t always breed a wild production of innovation.
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When I talk about creativity, I often tell people ways that they can prep for instances where they’re expected to be creative or come up with innovations in a group setting. When I inform people of this concept, and it’s a tested method I’ve used countless times, I explain that to truly be creative You have to plan for it. That goes against every prior idea I have commonly heard. Most will tell you to listen for it or let it come to you. Those are both important, but you have to allow yourself that time, and in a corporate setting with times lines and schedules you have to “put it on the books” so to speak.
True brainstorming happens on your own time. I know this and always am listening out for the next time I’ll be unknowingly called into a meeting where on the spot un planned brainstorming might happen. So in meetings, whenever I know I’m going to be with a group of people, in a situation where we will need to brainstorm, I always say, “hey guys, we’re going to brainstorm on this date. Be thinking about it.” I use that plan so frequently because I know that those words are going to settle in people subconscious. It will get the gears running in their creative process in their head and that… Is how you truly will get crazy innovative ideas because some of the best innovations happen when we’re not even thinking about them. In times where I want to start the gears running I might end a meeting with, “be thinking about this over the next week, and we’ll meet again to see what we’ve all come up with.”
I’m remembering back to 2020. I was a part of a group where we were tasked with doing a Kaizen. A different kind of Kaizen. This was one where everyone was sitting at home on their computers remotely logging in for the event through video chat. I was hesitant going into it. How are we going to do 3P events when all of us are in different locations Group work is hard enough sometimes for various reasons. It’s hard enough to hear their own thoughts in your head when you’re hearing everyone else’s thoughts. How would we come up with anything creative during the 3P? This is when I took my own advice. This is when I started to develop a method for the way to make brainstorming work. I always had the rise ways to make it work better and I knew that this was a time to test it. I took my own theory and I put it to work. I brainstormed ahead of time. I knew that we would only have a short amount of time to come up with our best innovative ideas. I think if I remember right, it may have been about five minutes of brainstorming time that we were given.
Let me tell you, you cannot brainstorm crazy ideas in that amount of time. But we had a schedule for the event and we had to stick to it. Here’s the thing, this is what my five minutes of brainstorming time looked like. I opened up my digital notepad. I went back to a file I had called “Event brainstorming”. In that file was all the brainstorming I had done for the last 3 months. I had been prepping for this very moment of five minutes of scheduled brainstorming time. I had already done the homework. As you can guess, I hadn’t let anyone know about it. And I can tell you that when it came to the next step in the process, when we were picking which ideas we wanted to explore as a group, two of my ideas made the final cut. My little secret was that I did not come up with them in five minutes. I came up with them over a few months of letting my creative brain explore and test ideas in my creative subconscious.
I should mention, as I tell so many people, when I talk about creativity, if you believe in it, you have to fight for it and if you’re gonna fight for it, you have to plan for it. And planning means you’ve gotta take the time to be creative and to exercise your creativity Outside of your busy 9 to 5 schedule.
This brings me back to my previous statement about how I recently discovered how brainstorming actually can work in a group setting. First, let’s look at what brainstorming in a group really is. It is a collection of ideas and input. That’s it. It is a starting point. The problem for it to work in a group setting is that it has to be a pretty structured problem where you really know what the walls of the box are, and your problem exists within that box and its not that serious or complex. Serious problems deserve the time to come up with crazy solutions.
“Serious problems deserve the time to come up with crazy solutions.”
The more rules in the problem statement, the more strict the direction of the problem is, the better brainstorming in a group will actually work. This means that no deep processing is really required for your brain. It’s a shallow thought process that’s required in this situation.
A day or two before writing this, I found myself in a meeting. A coworker was giving a presentation about things that he wasn’t personally an expert. To be fair one part of the subject matter, he was, but a lot of subject matter he needed his coworkers’ inputs. Together, we all gave our insights as we could. This I like to think of as a “stream of consciousness”, sort of input style. The co-worker took our ideas, put them into his own words and made notes so that he could go forward and creatively organize them into a thought process that he would later be able to present on confidently.
Essentially, in that situation, we were brainstorming. I wouldn’t say we were doing anything crazy and we weren’t accomplishing anything that would take your breath away. But it WAS teamwork. In addition we WERE giving him ideas. So ideally I would call it group brainstorming. Yes, there was even a bit of creativity because we were “creating” something that did not exist before the meeting, And THAT, is a great example of how you can use brainstorming as a group.
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My fear is always that processes will eventually kill creativity. I have to tell you I know how important processes are. When I’m tired, when my brain hurts from all the thinking and ideas, when I’ve worked late, started working early and checked my email right before I go to bed, When I’m tired. That’s when I need processes when I’m double checking the rules. I’ve given myself, it’s nice to have that checklist. We need processes. We cannot function without them however, we’ve got to schedule in the time to throw the processes out. Only for a moment. Because when a problem hasn’t been solved by those processes, it’s proven that it’s time to turn the switch off, it’s time to creatively, brainstorm and figure out a problem that could’ve been created by the wrong process. If a process isn’t working, it can’t be active in order to solve the problem. You have to stop away from the process to solve it and then come back and fit the solution back in. Or update the process
I think it’s gonna take me 20 more years to really figure out the best way to make this all work. The best part about having a theory about creativity and doing research, using real life experiences to prove and test those theories, is that sometimes I prove myself wrong. Sometimes I rewrite my own processes. And sometimes I find hope we creatively I thought there wasn’t any.
