Short version: It frequently helps for people to bounce ideas off each other, but forbidding disagreement isn’t useful. (The article doesn’t discuss possible ill-effects of too much hierarchy.)
At least for musicals, the best results seem to come from groups which include both people who’ve worked with each other before and newbies.
Huge gains can be gotten from random contacts—it’s good to be in a building where people from different specialties come in frequent contact with each other.
The book this post is based on (Serious Creativity) is also pretty critical of traditional brainstorming and “withholding judgment.” I chose the word “brainstorming” in the title because it’s catchier and more connotative than something like “idea generation.” Here’s an excerpt:
The traditional process of brainstorming sometimes gives the impression that deliberate creativity consists of shooting out a stream of crazy ideas in the hope that one of them might hit a useful target...a scatter-gun approach to creativity makes no more sense than having a thousand monkeys banging away on typewriters in the hope that one of them might produce a Shakespeare play.
He also discusses later in the book the differences between group and individual brainstorming, with the suggestions that, if you want to do a group brainstorming session, it should be split into repeated individual-thinking (separate from each other) followed by discussion, followed by more individual thinking, etc. One problem he identifies with group brainstorming is that you have to slow down a lot to explain things to other people.
Brainstorming semi-debunked
Short version: It frequently helps for people to bounce ideas off each other, but forbidding disagreement isn’t useful. (The article doesn’t discuss possible ill-effects of too much hierarchy.)
At least for musicals, the best results seem to come from groups which include both people who’ve worked with each other before and newbies.
Huge gains can be gotten from random contacts—it’s good to be in a building where people from different specialties come in frequent contact with each other.
The book this post is based on (Serious Creativity) is also pretty critical of traditional brainstorming and “withholding judgment.” I chose the word “brainstorming” in the title because it’s catchier and more connotative than something like “idea generation.” Here’s an excerpt:
He also discusses later in the book the differences between group and individual brainstorming, with the suggestions that, if you want to do a group brainstorming session, it should be split into repeated individual-thinking (separate from each other) followed by discussion, followed by more individual thinking, etc. One problem he identifies with group brainstorming is that you have to slow down a lot to explain things to other people.