Inspire Your Team to Creativity and Innovation

Innovation comes from teams more often than the light bulb moments of the lone genius.

BrainWriting

Most people are familiar with the concept of brainstorming. An issue is shared and the group randomly popcorns ideas while someone writes these ideas down without anyone commenting on them. Unfortunately, groupthink is a problem that often develops from this approach. When beginning a brainstorming session, some people will quickly blurt out whatever first comes to mind. The first responses are usually the obvious low hanging fruit. What commonly happens next is conformity sets in. The group will continue riffing on variations of the low hanging fruit and the ultimate insights are often incremental.

BrainWriting–a term coined by Leigh Thompson, a management professor at the Kellogg School–is a process where, instead of speaking the ideas, people journal them first on their own. The principle BrainWriting follows is that idea generation should exist separate from group influence to maintain independent thinking and creativity. The magic happens when the greater diversity of ideas meld together.  Thompson’s research concluded that BrainWriting groups generated 20% more ideas and 42% more original ideas as compared to traditional brainstorming groups. An added benefit to BrainWriting is that it encourages greater participation since quieter, more introverted people will contribute less in a brainstorming session because of the more vocal extroverts.