The Brainstorm Technique

Brainstorming!! Give it a try.
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THE BRAINSTORM TECHNIQUE
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THE BRAINSTORM TECHNIQUE

Perhaps the most popular creative technique is the brainstorm session. [This technique was formalized and given this name by Alex Osborn in 1939, while vice-president of the advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn.] Useful either on an individual basis or with groups, it can quickly provide large numbers of alternatives. For example, Fig. 4.1 shows a list of the ideas compiled in thirty minutes by twelve young engineers for the benefit of some observers from the Army Corps of Engineers (1955 Creative Engineering Program class, General Electric Co.). To explore this technique, let us first consider group brainstorming.

If we look upon such a session as being similar to a "bull session" in a relaxed atmosphere, we begin to see the type of environment necessary for a successful brainstorm session. For instance, all of us have participated in small impromptu groups dreaming up ways to play a trick on someone. We scheme, having it immediately topped by someone else, and then presenting a more outlandish trick ourselves. The buoyant spirit that permeates the atmosphere in these brief sessions is, indeed, an exhilarating one. And, occasionally, the resulting ideas are truly ingenious, brought into existence as the direct result of the mutual support and encouragement pervading the group.

If we study these bull sessions to see what makes them so conducive to imaginative adventure, we might observe several things:

1. The problem posed has a single focal point that is understood and appreciated by the participants.

2. Everyone knows the results are not important, so no one really bothers to evaluate the ideas that are presented. For the moment, no one cares whether any scheme could actually be made to work or not. Rather, each assumes every plan will work, and enjoys the mental picture of the probable results of the stunt.

3. Since no one evaluates the soundness of the ideas, none of the participants feels restricted except in purpose. His conceptual power enjoys the freedom of offering its combinations to a filter not inhibited either by fear of ridicule or difficult-to-break habits and fixations.

4. Having witnessed the approving comments and chuckles the first idea received, everyone does his best to come up with a still better or more fiendish one; competition has entered the picture.

Similarly, we can conduct a brainstorm session to accumulate alternatives for any problem, if we just remember these same simple rules:

(1) state the problem in basic terms, with only one focal point;
(2) do not find fault with or stop to explore, any idea;
(3) reach for any kind of an idea, no matter if it may seem remote at the time;
(4) provide the support and encouragement so necessary to free restrictive attitudes.

CONDUCTING BRAINSTORM SESSIONS

These rules demand an atmosphere that permits each man to freely depart from his logical and conforming mental control and to assume the framework established by the session leader. Since each participant has been selected because of an active interest in helping the leader, he will impose on his judicial filter the simple conditions stated by the leader, searching for alternatives that fall within the scope of the problem activity. Close cooperation among the participants as well as stimulating leadership on the part of the one who conducts the session are essential.

If such a session is not properly led, it can quickly degenerate into the customary type of group meeting closely resembling a deliberative jury; or at the other extreme, it can degenerate into a nonsensical and drifting bull session that will not produce any serious results. Everyone should attempt to stay within the broad framework defined by the leader, and not divert or stifle the flow of ideas once a session gets under way. However, an occasional outlandish scheme spontaneously offered can clear the air and spark further ideas.

For example, a former supervisor of the General Electric Company's Creative Engineering Program, in which current industrial problems are used as "homework," relates the following instance:

It seems a transformer must withstand a certain density of rainfall and not flash over. The way the transformers had been tested was to mount a sprinkler system above, and then adjust valves for the proper rainfall. The specification for the density of rainfall required was that a cup should fill in a certain length of time. You can imagine the time lost in juggling the valves before the proper density of rainfall could be adjusted. The problem we were asked to work on was a device which would measure instantaneously the density of the rainfall.

A number of us were standing close by the secretary's desk kicking around this problem, when the secretary butted in and said "Why don't you count the drops?" We looked at each other and knew we didn't dare laugh because secretaries have tender feelings. Lo and behold, one of the fellows popped up and said, "Now, that's no such a bad idea." He said, "How about it? Let's take a piece of blotter paper and impregnate it with an electrolyte. Let's put a heater underneath it; let's use a meter that will measure the power that we put into the heater tending to dry out this paper. If we hold the resistance constant, we can then calibrate the wattmeter in rainfall density." From that one suggestion that the secretary mentioned, we launched a number of possible solutions. Ridiculous as an idea may be, it may spark something in somebody else's mind which may be a good possibility.

If the leader is the one actively concerned with the solution of the problem, to stifle his own critical response to the normal flow of ideas imposes a very heavy burden upon his leadership ability. For instance, in one case an individual who had participated in many of these sessions--thoroughly enjoying them, freely contributing, and believing himself open-minded--turned into a hypercritical and stifling leader when conducting a session on a problem to which he had personally devoted much agonizing and frustrated thought.

As an example of the value of such sessions, two engineers had spent over a month in conceiving and accumulating twenty-seven embryonic solutions to a difficult control-device problem. When they were finally prevailed upon to conduct a brainstorming session, a group of eleven young engineers with no intimate acquaintance with the details of the problem came up with every one of these ideas plus many others in a short twenty-five-minute session.

INDIVIDUAL BRAINSTORMING

The mutual stimulation felt by group brainstorm participants can be a big factor in their saying "Yes" the next time their help in solving problems is requested. Research studies have indicated, however, that, for elementary exercises at least, the brainstorm is much more productive of distinctive ideas if each participant brainstorms by himself. Thus, four persons brainstorming as a group may get only two thirds as many ideas as four persons brainstorming by themselves, even after eliminating the duplicate ideas on the lists of the four individuals. Whether this holds true in more conceptually challenging problems (such as the rainfall-density-control problem), or in problems where strong, confining attitudes and habits exist, has no been determined.

Actually, within each of our problem-solving activities, the brainstorm technique is very useful in accumulating alternatives by oneself. A major hindrance in our personal conception of new ideas is that we do not maintain a judicial filter long enough to allow our imagination to present all the possibilities. The brainstorm technique helps in this respect, for it asks for either single or group mental concentration upon a single focal point until all thoughts are exhausted. If we stop at any time to evaluate or even raise a question, we immediately destroy that concentration as we assume the new focal point necessary to evaluate, answer, or defend.

To help cement the concept of the brainstorm technique, let us consider a simple analogy. Since in these sessions we are, as it were, looking for the pearl of an idea that will lead to a solution, let us look for a moment at how a pearl diver gets his pearls--perhaps we will see something that can help us in our quest for idea pearls.

A pearl diver goes out in his boat to the oyster beds, takes off his clothes, dons his swim suit and helmet, tosses a bag over his shoulder, and dives into the water. He very efficiently collects oysters and, when the bed is exhausted, he surfaces, goes ashore, and opens each one. Certainly, he would not hunt around until he found one oyster, then surface, climb into his boat, take off his paraphernalia, put on his clothes, take out his knife, break open the oyster, search for a pearl, and, if none were found, repeat the entire process with another oyster.

Yet, foolish as it is, this is just the way most of us try to get ideas. We insist upon dropping our established judicial filter the instant it receives one idea "oyster" from our imagination. We climb into our evaluative clothes to tear the idea to pieces, looking for some speck of a pearl before we go after another oyster. In brainstorm sessions we are looking only for oysters. We want to accumulate them all before we begin to make an efficient appraisal of them.

Brainstorming -- personal comments

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” A.Einstein

From my own experience, I expect it may take a bit of time and effort to re-orient one’s thinking from the somewhat hostile, defensive/offensive nature of most discussion groups to the imaginative, constructive, brainstorming type of posts and discussions that I envision for this discussion group. Towards this end, I offer a brainstorming technique that I find personally useful to free my mind from artificial “everyday” constraints. This technique actually led to the establishing of this web site.

What I did was create a document on my computer and then I keep adding to it as ideas come to me. The title of the document should explain how it works. It is “BIG Ideas awaiting a lottery win…”. (Not really much different from what L. Neil Smith says in Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision "All my life, I always really wanted ______ ''.)

Partially as a result of disappointments with some of the people involved in other discussion groups, I came up with the idea of Brainstorming on the Web. I kept adding details and finally, when I established my own web page, I decided to add this discussion section devoted exclusively to Brainstorming.

After my thinking had gone to extremes without consideration of means (proper brainstorming methodology), I realized that there were some items that I could actually do now, and this discussion group is one of them.