Do the brainstorming right, dammit!
In 1953, the publicist and founder of BBDO, Alex Osborn, published the book Applied Imagination, where he presented a theoretical-methodological framework for problem-solving. The world has not been the same since then, and poor Osborn does not rest in peace, considering all the outrages committed in his name.
The author’s thesis is that we are sorely lacking in imagination to solve the problems of everyday life: organizations, couples, individuals, fathers, and mothers of families urgently need some excellent injections of Imaginatil-D.
At the end of each section, Osborn poses questions and exercises to get you sharpened, in addition to the fact that each chapter has an exhaustive foundation that evidences the seriousness with which the author recovered, organized, and supported his own and others’ experiences, to propose the following stages of the problem-solving process, set out in “Phases of creative thinking” in Chapter XI:
Orientation: Delimiting the problem.
Preparation: Gather contextual data about the problem.
Analysis: Disaggregate the researched material around the problem.
Hypothesis: Accumulate alternatives of possible solutions.
Incubation: Invite enlightenment, and let things fall into place.
Synthesis: Putting the pieces together.
Verification: Test the resulting ideas.
These phases draw heavily from the work of Graham Wallas, and Osborn invokes other authors to strengthen his proposal.
Once the problem has been adequately pre-produced, Osborn proposes a series of operations to decompose and solve the problem: adaptation, modification, substitution, addition, multiplication, subtraction, division, magnification, minimization, rearrangement, reversal, and combination. Each is clearly explained and exemplified to facilitate its application in different contexts.
This set of mental operations should be put into play during collaborative work sessions that Osborn himself began to carry out with his collaborators at BBDO in the thirties; he called them brainstorming because all the participants had to put their brains to work around a common purpose, applying the phases of creative thinking mentioned above and the mental operations I referred to.
In the 1970s, Robert F. Eberle arranged these operations in an acronym to facilitate their memorization: SCAMPER. Let’s say that he packaged Osborn’s Thinking in a more accessible way.
One of the most important lessons of Osborn’s method is that BRAINSTORMING IS NOT THE FIRST THING THAT COMES TO YOUR MIND; YOU SMUG. It is the result of a process of research, analysis, and reflection that can be carried out individually or as a whole and that is directed towards the solution of a specific problem after having first considered the situation and understood its context.
The second important lesson is that Osborn insistently warns about the danger of distractions, our daily kraken.
The third important lesson is that for Osborn, as for many other scholars of the creative process, such as Guilford, Torrance, and Csíkszentmihályi, the place where the magic happens matters. Apropos of this, Osborn states in Chapter XX:
As a rule, offices are better for judicial functioning than creative thinking. One man I know has found that he can ponder creative problems much better by staying home in the morning. Once, when faced with an arduous creative task, I went to an inn more than 100 miles away. Not only was I not interrupted, not only did I get away from the routine, but because I had made an effort to go so far away to engage in a creative endeavor, my imagination seemed to work much better. The mere fact of making that trip sharpened my creative wit.
One is to add the arrangement of resources and people involved in the same space to the location. In this regard, the designer Luki Huber, creator of Manual thinking, says that in creative sessions, people work much better at high tables to stand and move around more freely, not passively and with a sulk, like some people I know.
When I’m in my office, separated by a thin glass wall from the hallway where everyone passes by, says hello, asks if they can come in, or passes by making noise, I think of Alex Osborn in that silent inn. I’m glad I don’t have fragmentation grenades in my bag (thanks to my colleagues who also go to work unarmed because I’m very loud).
I met Applied Imagination a decade ago when we conducted research at CENTRO that years later resulted in the Guide to creative techniques, a collection of the best practices and methods to facilitate problem-solving. Since then, I have been campaigning against decaffeinated brainstorming, which consists of sitting down with compadres who are just as mistaken as you are to come up with proposed solutions to a problem they all don’t know about.
Alex Osborn rolls over in his grave every time you call that shoddy meeting a “brainstorming session,” let him rest in peace, damn it!
What can we learn from all this? When done right, brainstorming does work, but it requires previous work, research, focus, and appropriate spaces (physical or virtual) for the process to flow, a necessary condition for creativity.
Brainstorming is not a pizza meeting but a study session and joint work to address a problem systematically. There are other ways to achieve this: TRIZ, SIT, and SYMPLEX are some that you can explore instead of spitting out ideas willy-nilly.
