(GASPS)
(PROJECTOR WHIRRING)
Brainstorming is the most widely implemented creativity technique.
It was pioneered by this ad executive named Alex Osborn.
In a series of best-selling business books in the 1940s and early '50s,
he outlined the technique called brainstorming.
Basically, there's one rule to brainstorming,
which is "don't criticize".
Whatever you do in a brainstorming meeting,
you cannot criticize the ideas of other people.
All ideas are good ideas.
The assumption is that imagination is very meek and shy and fragile.
(LAUGHTER)
If it worries about being criticized it'll clam up
and won't be able to free associate at all.
The problem with brainstorming is that it doesn't work.
Psychologists have known this for 60-plus years.
Study after study has shown that if you tell people to brainstorm,
they come up with fewer and less original ideas
than those same people working by themselves.
Brainstorming would become less than the sum of our parts.
The reason brainstorming doesn't work
returns us to the very first rule - thou shalt not criticize.
As studies by Charlan Nemeth have shown,
groups that engage in "debate and dissent",
where they're encouraged to engage in constructive criticism,
come up with 25% to 40% more ideas,
and those ideas are much more original.
That's because when we don't criticize each other,
when we pretend that every idea is a good idea,
we float on the superficial surface of the imagination.
Our free associations, left to their own devices, are not interesting.
If I ask you to free associate on "blue",
I predict, with a high degree of accuracy,
that your first answer will be "green",
followed by "ocean", "sky".
Then things get more complicated.
You may say "Joni Mitchell" or "Miles Davis"
or "jeans" or "Smurfs", but nothing too profound or surprising.
That's because our free associations are bound by language,
which is full of cliches.
The way we get past those cliches is to engage in criticism.
That's what surprises us, invigorates us, wakes us up.
It means paying attention to the ideas of other people.
It forces us to dig a little bit deeper
and that's when things get interesting.