IDEAS- Issue # 7 (Oct. 2006)

Monthly newsletter dedicated to organisational innovation, creativity and change.

Brainstorming With Half the Brain

I once participated in a brainstorming session, which was organised to find ways to improve my employer's business. At the beginning, the organiser--a director--shared the objective of the session and invited everyone to share ideas. Immediately, people started offering all kinds of ideas, some pretty wild ones, but every time an idea was offered, the director evaluated it and concluded whether it was feasible or not. Soon, people were hesitating to open the mouth, the flow of ideas stopped and the meeting became a monologue. Later, only he was speaking and everyone else was nodding the head. Sounds familiar?

What happened in that meeting is pretty common. Though brainstorming, one of the most widely used creative thinking techniques, was invented by Alex Osborn in 1941, even today, not many people are able to make good use of it.

The word "brainstorming" sounds exotic, but it's simply a way to pull together a group of people to generate ideas about a specific issue, say, a teething problem or features of a new product or cost reduction or a strategy to counter competitive pressures. When done properly, brainstorming has proven to be a highly productive and rewarding way to generate a heap of ideas. For many organisations, such as advertising agencies and product design companies, brainstorming is like a religious prayer. It has to be done regularly without fail.

If you are ever caught in a brainstorming session, either as a participant or a leader, remember two things to make it a success:

1. Never criticise an idea

The biggest mistake you can commit during a brainstorming session is to criticise or show contempt for an idea offered by someone. That's a real killer. The moment an idea is labelled as "not workable," "impractical" or "stupid," people become cautious and the flow of ideas stops. And there is a scientific basis for that.

Roger Sperry, the winner of 1981 Nobel Prize for medicine, showed that two sides of our brain--left and right--perform highly specialised, but different functions. Among other things, our left brain specializes in analytical, logical and critical thinking, while the right brain deals with creativity and possibilities.

When we're generating ideas, we operate in the right-brain thinking mode, but when we observe an idea being criticised, we are thrown to left-brain thinking mode in order to assess our own ideas. We start worrying if our ideas will be acceptable or not. And this switch from right to left brain cuts off the connection to our creativity and the supply of ideas comes to an end.

The correct way is to assure everyone beforehand that the session is purely for generating and collecting ideas pertaining to the issue under focus, and there will be no scrutiny of ideas during the session.

2. Focus on quantity not quality

This may sound illogical to our logical minds, but there is a catch here. If you don't have a good number of ideas on the table, you might not end up with good ideas. The point is that you may have 10 ideas about a problem, but unless you cough up all 10, you will never know which is the best one. Similarly, a group of 12 people may have the capacity to generate 150 ideas in 40 minutes, but unless you allow all those ideas to come out in the open, your choice will be limited and the best ideas may remain buried in someone's head.

So, during a brainstorming session, everyone should be encouraged to share as many ideas as possible because...the key to quality lies in the quantity. Every idea, however stupid, wild or impractical it may appear, should be welcomed.

>>IDEA: Many problems that we face at personal, departmental or organisational level can be solved if we take the initiative to tap the brains of those around us. Whatever be your position in the corporate hierarchy, smartness lies not in trying to be the smartest brain around, but in tapping the collective power of the brains around you.

Brainstorming is one of the most effective ways to get people to share their ideas. In essence, this technique is about taking up a well-defined issue to focus on, bringing together a group of people and telling them "Don't worry about anything. Just share your ideas." The rest will happen automatically: Ideas will start flowing out of their minds. Soon, you will have a bucketful of ideas.

Note: If you want to see how, by stopping the interference of left brain (the judgmental side), you can become more creative and come up new ideas, try this little experiment: Take up any problem/confusion/challenge that you're currently facing in your professional or personal life. Then, tell yourself: "For next 20 minutes, I will feel absolutely free to come up with ideas to tackle this issue and not evaluate any of them. I will simply generate as many ideas as possible." Next, start writing down your ideas without any pause. After 20 minutes, you will be surprised by the number of ideas you could generate in such a short duration. That's brainstorming with half the brain!

Atul Mathur

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***Copyright 2006 Atul Mathur***

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