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Rethinking Groupthink

You sure that works?

Finally, after years of bashing the notion of brainstorming, there is research indicating its usefulness. As a matter of fact, people do consistently come up with better ideas on their own when they think hard and deep rather than spending half the time listening to the ideas of others and the other half just waiting around for ideas to pop up. There is, what the researchers call 'evaluation apprehension' - so there's a natural tendency to hold back your ideas when ideating in a group as compared to when doing it on your own. Having led countless project teams and committees at meetings and sessions when we need to come up with ideas for a variety of different sort of stuff, I guess I have a pretty good idea how useful group-brainstorming is.

I was introduced to brainstorming when I was 11, where I attended a course on WITs (Work Improvement Teams) and subsequently represented the school in a WITs competition organized by one of the polytechnics in Singapore. Subsequently, I picked up individual ideation techniques from the Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats course when I was in Secondary school. I found it much easier to come up with lots of ideas when you don't feel like you're at risk of being judged.

And books I read about thinking, group work, and management agree with me on that and emphasized the need to create a space for thinking and ideation that suspends judgment completely. And it's not just about verbal judgment, it goes beyond that. Participants must truly believe that they are not being assessed, judged or perceived negatively in that group thinking environment. It works well in a setting with people who are already extremely familiar with each other but may be more difficult amongst strangers.

So why not designate group thinking sessions as meetings where people already came up with lots of individual ideas and then are asked to reconcile them. As mentioned in the research, this 'brainwriting' technique appears to work much better. It is surprising then, that it hasn't quite been used that extensively in work and project settings.

A hint then, for those of you working on PW and frustrated with your teammates who may be 'social loafing'.