That's Not Brainstorming

Teresa Torres responds to reactions to her earlier post arguing against traditional brainstorming. She clarifies how creative output is measured (fluency, flexibility, originality) and addresses objections about facilitators, sticky notes, and alternative group techniques like brainwriting and the nominal group technique. She acknowledges the research has limitations, especially its use of untrained student groups, but argues the core issue is Osborn's rules, not group ideation itself. She concludes by urging teams to test newer methods against their current practice and restates her recommendations for capturing, sharing, and diversifying ideas. The piece matters because many teams rely on brainstorming by habit without checking whether it produces results.

01Key takeaways

• Measure ideation output by fluency, flexibility, and originality to judge whether a session is working.
• Trained facilitators usually bring group brainstorming up to individual performance, not above it, so weigh their cost.
• Try brainwriting or the nominal group technique and compare the results against your current ideation method.
• Osborn's classic brainstorming rules are the part the research questions, not group ideation as a whole.
• Keep all ideas visible so teammates can extend, comment on, or vote for them.
• Include diverse people and pull ideas from other parts of the organization to improve outcomes.

02Key sections

What Creative Outcomes Mean

Torres defines creativity through fluency, flexibility, and originality, using a simple animal-list example. She explains why fluency still matters, since more ideas tend to produce more diverse and unique ones.

Facilitators and Stickies Only Partly Help

Trained facilitators and sticky notes improve group sessions, but mostly bring groups up to the level of individuals working alone rather than beyond it. Most companies cannot justify the cost of facilitation for that gain.

Other Forms of Group Ideation

Brainwriting and the nominal group technique reduce production blocking and conformity, and they outperform classic brainstorming in the research. Torres notes that many critics of her post favored these approaches.

Limits of the Research

The studies mostly used untrained student teams without facilitators, which Torres admits is a weakness. She argues this still resembles how many companies actually brainstorm with cross-functional teams that don't know each other.

Recommendations

Torres restates her advice: capture ideas as they occur, keep them visible and extendable, include diverse people, and borrow ideas across domains. She encourages teams to run their own experiments comparing methods.

03From the post

“Thursday’s post, Stop Brainstorming and Generate Better Ideas, got quite the reaction, particularly on Twitter. I’m not surprised. I also reacted strongly when I first learned about the research against brainstorming. Rather than moving on to idea evaluation, I want to first respond to the most common objections.”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.