OK, people, let’s spitball some topics for this column. Annoying co-workers you would like to replace with artificial intelligence? Office wardrobe malfunctions? Bosses’ secret TikTok accounts? Go ahead, shout ’em out. There are no bad ideas.
This brainstorming exercise is, in fact, a terrible idea—not only because I can’t hear you. The value of gathering to swap loosely formed thoughts is highly suspect, despite being a major reason many companies want workers back in offices.
“You do not get your best ideas out of these freewheeling brainstorming sessions,” says Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School. “You will do your best creative work by yourself.”
Iyengar has compiled academic research on idea generation, including a decade of her own interviews with more than a thousand people, into a book called “Think Bigger.” It concludes that group brainstorming is usually a waste of time.
Pitfalls include blabbermouths with mediocre suggestions and introverts with brilliant ones that they keep to themselves. She argues that the ethos of brainstorming—reserve judgment and build on what others say—is better applied to polite conversation at a dinner party than to key decisions in a conference room.
Business teams ought to collaborate, of course, but she interprets the evidence to mean that colleagues should compare notes after extensive, independent thinking.
Plenty of people have always bemoaned brainstorming. Longtime Wall Street Journal readers may recall a 2006 “Cubicle Culture” column that skewered the popular practice, and Harvard Business Review published a research-based case against the usefulness of brainstorming in 2015. Mostly, though, grumblers have accepted such meetings as an inescapable office reality, like elevator Muzak and bad coffee.
Enough, some companies and workers say.
“I’ve gone from being the biggest brainstorming proponent to feeling anxiety if a meeting doesn’t have a clear agenda,” says Drew Himel, chief executive of Fireside, an e-commerce strategy firm.
Himel says bantering around a table fits his outgoing personality, but the pandemic and an executive coach led him to a humbling realization: He talks too much. He discovered that his 16-person team, now fully remote, thrives when people develop ideas on their own and can share them in writing.
They still get together virtually to discuss and refine what they’ve come up with, but these revamped meetings are tightly organized and tangent-free.
Elsewhere, companies like Alphabet’s Google try to encourage innovation by letting workers spend part of their work time building on their own ideas for what could benefit the business. Some such as Shopify and Wayfair have slashed meeting times, part of the working world’s re-examination of checking in, touching base and catching up in the hybrid era. Microsoft research shows that many people spend the equivalent of an entire workday in meetings every week (and another day’s worth of time reading and sending emails).
Other firms maintain that our screens are the real problem, and creative sparks will fly if we convene in person. The longer offices remain half empty, the more some executives glorify face-to-face get-togethers as fountains of innovation.
“In the more productive brainstorm sessions I’ve been a part of over the years, people get excited and blurt out new ideas or improvements to prior proposals, quickly advancing the seed of an idea, and leading to the broader group getting energized and feeling that it’s onto something,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a recent memo to explain why most employees must report to an office at least three days a week, starting this month.
An Amazon spokesman adds that the company’s brainstorming sessions are sometimes unstructured but often begin with colleagues sharing well-researched memos, reducing time spent on ill-conceived ideas.
Devoted brainstormers do exist outside the C-suite. They don’t dispute research showing that free-form confabs are often fruitless. They maintain that breakthrough moments are possible and make the process worthwhile. Critics have unreasonable expectations, they say.
Lukas Kaiser, senior vice president of content at Westbrook Media in Los Angeles, subscribes to a 70-30 theory: 70% of ideas in a brainstorming session are idiotic (his word), and that’s a fair price to pay for the 30% of ideas that have merit.
Oh, he’s also noticed that the duds tend to come first, so to leave time for the good stuff, he prescribes two-hour meetings.
“People need to feel safe to say things that won’t be judged so they can get to the next thing, which might end up being the best thing they’ve ever thought of,” he says.
Meg Amis, a marketing director in Philadelphia, says she loves the energy of huddling in a room to slap sticky notes on a wall or scribble on a whiteboard. Regardless of whether everyone participates or a gathering yields something actionable, the process can set an inclusive tone and rally support for a project, she contends.
“With anything that requires multiple people’s buy-in, it’s better to start with a brainstorming session because then everybody feels like they’re part of it,” she says.
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