I've participated in several team programming competitions. The way every team worked was - everybody read all tasks, quickly decide who works on what, and then we work solo on one problem each in parallel, when somebody finishes (s)he can help others who are stuck or take on another tasks. Talking about the problem all the way was way too slow and didn't much helped.

But problem-solving isn't the only creative thinking people do. When creating a story for table-top RPGs brainstorming works great.

This, interestingly, aligns with some advice we received as a young couple. it was advised to periodically ask the other about their ideas and dreams without either 1) telling them it wont work or 2) asking how they'll make it work. Just to explore how the other things, feels, and dreams about the future. An example would be like "I really would love to sail a boat with my children one day, i think it would be so cool to teach them skills on the ocean and show them the world. Plus theres no internet there so we can all focus on eachother, I'd love that." --> Even if the dream is impossible look what they said, they want to deeply invest and connect with you and children, they value seeing the world, and the find beauty in it, etc.

I think it helps to have weekly-or-so discussions about The Problems We're Having Lately, not so much as "brainstorming" but giving people a chance to offer their latest ideas and explain problems encountered with previous ideas.

None of the brainstorms I've ran, or taken part in, ended with a, "eureka, that's it!" type of moment.

And coming up with the 'solution' was never the point. It was about doing something generative, creative, and fun together. It was about engaging folks and collaborating in a different way than they might be used to. I'd also start by offering a few very poorly drawn, completely nonsensical ideas.

Discovery work to get to a viable 'solution' takes weeks - months - years. Nobody assumes it happens during a one hour brainstorming session.

If group brainstorming is top of mind for a lot of executives, it's a good bet that there's way too much of it going on. If a dev team thinks they always do their best work in isolation, they're probably missing out on some major benefits to be had by mixing in more collaboration and pair programming.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30074949

Once we have a list of ideas, then whittle the list down with the realist and pessimistic people of the group; until there's one obvious way forward or a couple of least worse ideas.

Generally most people are better at telling you what you can't do,

This article is terrible and comes off as someone that doesn't like brainstorm sessions and feels the need to justify their (valid) preference by saying brainstorming is bad.

I wouldn't work with this person.

I'm glad this was where the author ended up. As I read this, I kept thinking that I know how to get better ideas out of people than a lot of typical brainstorming scenarios I've experienced in the past. My mind kept going back to how good some of the (Agile) retros I've had, and the one thing they all had in common was psychological safety was key. Creating a safe space allowed people to really express their issues, which made it much easier to address them. I've always understood one of the most important actions in a brainstorming session is the "turkey shoot" by one of the seniors. It's an idea so bad that even interns think, oh, my idea is better than that and so find it easier to participate. Without that, you can very much end up with a session dominated by hierarchy.

From the quotes by Osborn it seems his purpose for it was to find ideas, no matter how far out there. Whereas the researchers were directing people to use brainstorming to find (what sounds like) one or a small number of viable solutions. Those are two different activities, so an approach could be useful for one and useless (or suboptimal) for the other, but there is no way to conclude how applicable it is to the former based on studies of the latter.

In the brainstorming sessions I've attended, the next stage involves the facilitator taking all of the idea stubs and grouping them together, then riffing on the idea groups. The whole process (intentionally?) feels like improv comedy. And much like improv, it often seems geared more for the enjoyment of the participants than the quality of the output.

And maybe that's ok, using brainstorming purely as a tool to circulate half-ideas and get the creative juices flowing? But in a design sprint, the brainstorming outputs are often directly used for longer term planning. I've found something like a lightweight RFC process is a much better medium for refining and discussing ideas. RFCs are usually written alone, and discussed as a group.

That's not true. That would be brainstorming at its average. Has this person ever sat in a writer's room?

> at its worst, it perpetuates negative cultural habits, reinforces hierarchies, stunts productivity, and severely limits creativity.

Well yeah, anything at its worst is going to be counterproductive. Is that a revelation? I hate to say this phrase, but if that's the results of your brainstorming sessions, then you're doing it wrong.

The ideas of improv and the book Impro are relevant here.

Lastly, the purpose of brainstorming isn't productivity or results. It's about increasing the dimensionality of ideas. If one simply thinks alone, one may be stuck in linear or planar thinking. A brainstorming session or practice can help break out of that, where individuals can then return to solo thinking with a renewed exploration space and potentially a path through that.

"Viability" paints you into a tiny corner of the solution space. Removing it from the equation lets you freely walk around and inspect other corners (which you can paint yourself into later).

The problem is what is coming after brainstorming, the execution is the problem. We all have ideas, individually and as a group, but after idea is born, validation and executions are next crucial steps. Then you can conclude that you had a successful brainstorming.

In the cited article, sure the faster problem solvers will solve more individually. But

1) the proper grain to measure success is as the team level, and

2) it's easy to score a problem with a known answer, but it is significantly harder for a group to come to consensus as to what the best answer might be – you can't always just crunch the numbers to see who was right.

The advantages of the brainstorm at the team level can be profound: they can reach consensus as to what these better options are, as well as a shared understanding of the problem space and what the next steps are.

[1] https://www.thefountaininstitute.com/blog/what-is-the-double...

It can provide psychological safety for your own subconscious. Write down every idea, regardless of how ridiculous it is. Every "What if I...". I sometimes do a question and answer format in a simple text/markdown document. Write out a question that's one facet of the issue you're working on, and answer it with a bunch of different options. Then discard or select or flesh out the responses. Ask questions about what might and might not work with each option.

It's amazing what having a few different new paths to try can do for your energy levels and motivation.

Also, a separate comment to this thread:

Edward De Bono's "Six Thinking Hats" is an alternative way of approaching innovative idea generation.

https://www.debonogroup.com/services/core-programs/six-think...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats

The second trick is to have only people that are comfortable with each other in the room.

So yes. If anything can improve your work experience, your productivity , it's psychological safetry

Taken to an extreme it would be sensible to give teams a annual bonus at the start of the year. Give them FU money and so be fairly confident they will say FU when it's needed

The corollary to Production Blocking occurs when a person realizes that the supposedly crazy idea that they were holding on to themselves for fear of being judged is not as crazy as they thought it is when they hear another person in the room say the same thing. It might even build allies and consensus leading to offline collaboration outside of the brainstorming context.

Evaluation Apprehension is a real concern. If a brainstorming session is run well, the facilitator would have established the ground rules (no interruptions, no judgments etc.,) and would quickly bring any conflicting behavior to an end.

The most important benefit of brainstorming, imo, is the fact that introverts are not drowned out by extroverts or junior team members being overruled on the spot by experienced people. This is not a bug, it is a feature.

In many scenarios, the person who comes up with the idea is not the same one who implements it. For eg: an end user of a system, a software engineer, a product manager etc., Having a diverse group where individuals play different roles tends to bring out differing perspectives. If you can't bring them out in the open in the early stages of idea generation, you are clearly missing out.

Edward de Bono, the person who coined the term Lateral Thinking has developed a lot of tools for creative thinking. His book, Serious Creativity changed my mindset and taught me that creativity, the kind we use every day as opposed to artistic creativity like painting/acting etc., is something that one can practice everyday and get better at. One such method / tool that he developed is Six Thinking Hats. In the book, he goes on to explain that the underlying cause of perceived lack of psychological safety is the human brain's ability to get into conflicting thinking modes for eg: when one person is in creative mode, another person is in evaluation mode or what de Bono calls as Green Hat and Black Hat respectively. Much of his work in Six Thinking Hats is around getting the entire group in the same thinking mode, what de Bono calls as Parallel Thinking. Here's a nice video of him explaining some of the thinking processes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbsKQQGwsMg

Recognizing this (different thinking modes) is key to having a productive group brainstorm and avoiding pitfalls.

  Every day, everywhere in a democracy, juries are proving that a dozen minds can jointly judge and judge well. But that’s judicial thinking; how about creative thinking? Can a squad produce ideas? The answer is yes. Properly organized and run, a group can be a gold-mine of ideas. It was in 1939 when I first organized such group-thinking in our company. The early participants dubbed our efforts “Brainstorm Sessions”; and quite aptly so because, in this case, “brainstorm” means using the brain to storm a creative problem—and do so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.

I strongly prefer to have draft quality periodic reports/memos to be read by the team members than a tons of crappy Jira issues gathering dust and spreading confusion.

I don’t think it’s as big of a deal as it might seem, though. You still need to get together and decide what to do with your team, it just probably should be a safe space is all. We knew that.

Hardly anything works without safety, and nearly anything works with safety. Sounds good to me.

why does brainstorming often fail to generate new ideas? any time there is a sufficiently complex calculus involved in solving a problem, solution generation involves understanding that calculus. a brainstorm session must include people that understand the problem and solution spaces well. otherwise, the brainstorming is often useless.

almost all brainstorming sessions i have seen ignore this concept and result in no useful generation and a lot of wasted time.