Jonah Lehrer has an interesting piece in the New Yorker discussing research into brainstorming. His focus is mainly on creativity in research groups, but there are some lessons for brainstorming in dispute resolution contexts as well. For example, he describes research showing that the classic brainstorming advice–no criticism–is counterproductive. In fact, the evidence suggests that critique and debate help generate more ideas overall, as well as more good ideas. That appears to be because the process of debate helps people to engage with the ideas of others, expanding perspective and leading to greater creativity. Groups are also more productive when they consist of people with a variety of personal relationships. Groups of strangers don’t do as well because they don’t engage with one another enough, and groups of very close people don’t do as well because they all think alike.
In my opinion, the classic process of group brainstorming is flawed not because of its unspoken assumption that criticism is unpleasant, but rather because the entire process is constructed around one oversimplified premise: the absence of criticism leads to better individual contribution in a group setting.
With that said, I don’t believe that the social experiment conducted by Yale University disproves the assumption or premise behind the process of group brainstorming. The inference I drew from the social experiment was that the process fails to address other factors that might affect the quality and quantity of an individual’s participation; for example, individual levels of EQ, individual biases, social biases and social influences.
Social scientists should keep these factors in mind and experiment with the process of group brainstorming. It is not outside the realm of reason that a reconfigured group brainstorming process—that still retains the rule barring criticism—could lead to the most optimal results.
As it stand, however, social experiments such as the one conducted by Yale seem to show that, in many circumstances, the process of amalgamating ideas generated during individual brainstorming sessions nets better results than the current process of group brainstorming.