Brainstorming in the Digital Age

Does it have a viable role in an increasingly AI world?

Note: I tried an experiment with this article. This is a transcript of a voice recording I made in a cafe. The app transcribed it and I have left the style in tact - more informal, chatty and quite conversational. It seemed in keeping with the subject matter. This is me, Essex eastender from London!)

Introduction

Let’s take a look at one of the most popular and prevalent creativity tools that’s been around for a long time, probably since we’ve ever talked about creativity and business in enterprise in management, and that’s brainstorming. You may well have already tried brainstorming in your life or on your course. And there’s usually a main description of it, and perhaps one way of doing it. And if you haven’t tried it before, you probably just recognise that you may well have done it anyway, informally. It’s the generation of ideas.

What Is Brainstorming Really Like?

Actually it’s got other expressions around it now, such as a thought shower or thought storm (yikes!) and what it is involving really is usually in a group where a group of people will sit around in a circle in a group. It can be done online now too, and they will simply generate as many ideas as they can.

Think of sitting in a group, you would go round the circle. Each person would take a turn around a particular problem, how do we improve customer service, ideas for a new product, ideas to solve a particular problem, and people just share their ideas and you go round and round and those ideas would get captured. Sometimes on a flip chart. Someone might take notes. Often it’s better that everyone sees those ideas and they don’t get changed. You don’t get interpreted by whoever’s collecting the ideas.

You simply just write them and collect them and a key principle of brainstorming is everyone gets a turn. It’s done very equally, very democratically, and you don’t change what people have said as you collect those ideas and they’re certainly not judged at the time. So all ideas are accepted, crazy ones, predictable ones. Even if somebody says a similar idea, almost the same, because they’ve forgotten someone else came up with an idea, you’d still write it up. So we just go round, we keep writing them. We keep putting the ideas and suddenly within a few minutes even you’ve got literally potentially tens, hundreds of ideas and we keep going till we run out and when we keep going round and round if someone doesn’t have an idea, particularly after a while, that’s okay.

We just jump to the next person. And if it gets to a place where we keep going round and quite a few people have run out of ideas, then we might just go into freewheeling where anybody can then just keep coming up with ideas until we’ve all run out. And you’ll come up with different versions of this depending how much time you’ve got. You might just allow five minutes for a brainstorm until we run out of time.

Other people will say well, keep brainstorming until we’ve run out of ideas. So the principles are we try and get a flow of creative ideas. We keep going round and round the group until we’ve run out of ideas, run out of time. Those ideas are not judged. And then, of course, there are other tools and approaches for grouping those ideas, for voting on those ideas, for prioritising them, maybe against business objectives and priorities, and that organising of those ideas comes later.

Brainstorming Alone

Other versions of this too is that you can sort of do brainstorming on your own. You could do it just yourself, you have a problem or an issue and you could do a brainstorm where you simply take a blank piece of paper and write down as many ideas as you can personally think of until you run out. You essentially make a list and some people do that, so brainstorming is normally done in a group. It’s sometimes done alone.

Crowdsourced Ideas Through Social Media

And now of course with the rise of technology it’s possible to crowdsource ideas. And you can put out a question on social media and suddenly find, you know, you literally get lots and lots and lots of ideas from people you may never have met and so lots of people have been doing that in recent years on their favourite social media platforms. They might tweet out a question and suddenly find, particularly if they’ve got a lot of followers, they might get 500 answers and you could again time limit that or you might just keep that open and just notice ideas coming in all the time. It’s particularly good for things like customer feedback, ideas for features of a product and you just throw the question out. Throw the questions out and simply get ideas coming in.

What Makes It Work

The idea of a brainstorm is the idea that we’re inherently creative, and if we can go into a flow where we don’t feel judged, we don’t feel defensive. No one’s kind of looking at whether our ideas are crazy or not, because everything goes. Then when you can relax into it, the notion is that creative flow improves. And so if you’re just discussing something, and as you went along, people came up with ideas, but somebody then said, well, I’m not sure that is a good idea or what do you mean by that in a kind of negative way. Then people tend to clam up. People tend to get defensive. The doors of that flow tend to close for some people, and they default to silence.

Or Not … Brainstorming and the Collusion of Mediocrity

One criticism of brainstorming that cuts deeper than fear or culture is that it can become a collective rehearsal of the obvious. When participants play it safe or mirror each other’s suggestions, a kind of unspoken agreement sets in. People subtly protect the status quo by repeating safe, sensible, familiar ideas. This is sometimes described as a collusion of mediocrity — not because people are unintelligent, but because the setting rewards conformity disguised as collaboration. The brainstorm fills up with beige ideas. Everyone participates, but nothing daring is said. The illusion of creativity masks the absence of risk. This is often reinforced by hierarchies, target-led facilitation or reputational caution. When real disruption is needed, the brainstorm may only surface refinements of what already exists. If mediocrity is quietly shared, it is also rarely challenged. The creativity has already been compromised before it begins.

Culture and Anonymous Brainstorming

So criticisms of brainstorming, though, have been that if there is still a culture of defensiveness, brainstorming doesn’t solve that, and you could end up with just a safe, mediocre list of ideas. And no one says how they really feel, and that’s been addressed by the idea of brainstorming in anonymous ways, so that will tend to be typed ideas and no one quite knows who came up with the ideas. If there’s a bit of a fear of being criticised or being judged in some way. A

nd so anonymous online brainstorming has come about recently too. But what that doesn’t address is why people are fearing in the first place and even then, with technology and the idea now that we can be tracked very easily, a lot of people will still not assume that their anonymity is really anonymous. And that’s been a criticism of the idea of taking brainstorming anonymously, that people somehow still recognise your handwriting or recognise the IP address of where your computer came from.

Trust as the Foundation

Ultimately brainstorming is better and works well in high trust cultures where people are relaxed who don’t fear to say any ideas that are coming up and don’t feel that somehow their card’s going to be marked by a manager, that somehow they’re going to get criticised in some way. It could affect their promotion and so on. That fear has to be dealt with, and if it isn’t dealt with, you won’t tend to get a true brainstorm. It’s almost like some doors of that creativity are closed.

Going Deeper Than the Obvious

Another suggestion too is that when we brainstorm, particularly with time limits on, it is some people just simply generate the same old ideas again that just happen to be on the surface of their memory. How can we go much much deeper? And so sometimes that’s when there might be in an organisation an away day for the whole team and they might do some activities and games to relax, to let go, to maybe create trust between the team. Because without that trust, without that openness, you can brainstorm, but it might be within a narrow range of ideas.

Playing It Safe in Formal Settings

Now, a typical example of that could actually be on a course with students where the lecturer says right, let’s practise some brainstorming, and because the students might think that that lecturer is the one that’s going to be marking their assignment when we do a brainstorm, they just play it safe. They don’t come up with the craziest ideas because they would think they might be judged as lacking intelligence and whatever the lecturer says, “oh no, you know, no one’s going to be judged here”, if you’re say on a new course and you don’t know your colleagues and you don’t know the member of staff, the lecturer, then you’re still going to play safe.

Is True Brainstorming Even Possible in Today’s Organisations?

So one critique of brainstorming is just given the nature of organisational life that people are employed and that some people leave, that times can be tough. No one ever truly relaxes enough for there to be a true brainstorm. And so that it’s inherently flawed and that goes right to the heart of the academic literature around a creative flow state that we tend to flow at our best when there’s nothing in the way, when there’s nothing blocking, and the literature around flow, it’s a bit like a river, as if there’s rocks in the way, then the river diverts or gets dammed up. And it’s something worth considering for yourself about how much you feel you can find that creative flow, say, amongst your fellow students, or your friends, or your family. Or are there certain subjects that can’t be explored because you feel you might be judged?

And In the Age of AI?

Brainstorming is also changing in the age of AI. Some people now use AI tools to generate long lists of ideas quickly or to combine and remix suggestions from earlier brainstorming sessions. These tools can be helpful for sparking associations or prompting questions, but they do not replace the trust, nuance and relational aspects of a human brainstorm. AI can generate possibilities, but it cannot sense the culture of a room. If brainstorming is about flow, risk and emotional safety, then these are still things that machines do not navigate. Technology may assist the process, but it cannot lead it.

So, Are Genuine Ideas Possible?

So we’re left not with an answer, really, but a question. That brainstorming, relative to just having ideas we discuss and people judge them, does release the dam of ideas for a lot of people. But it is limited by the culture of the organisation, the society, the group, the friendships, the colleagues that you have and how open you feel that you can actually be. One thing that you may notice in organisations you work for is where the culture really is sometimes called a no blame culture and that people are actually promoted for the craziest ideas that they come up with and that people tend to react well to people who are disruptive in a good way with their ideas. And what we feel is that when we are being crazy with ideas and innovative and different that it’s serving the goals of the organisation we work for and then you can get high levels of trust and then you can get really creative ideas coming out.

And some of the most successful small disruptive businesses have come about because they have this culture. In one example, like the writing of computer games, some of the best games that have been reviewed as this is radical, to use that classic expression, this has broke new ground, is that people are rewarded for failure, people are rewarded for learning from their mistakes, for being able to risk failure by going into all the crazy areas. Because in there you can sometimes mine the most crazy sounding ideas for the gold that could become the successful new game in the future. Or a new feature on an upgrade of a game.

Playing Too Safe

So do you play it too safe? Would you feel free and open to say whatever is in your mind in a brainstorm? Or have you got some habits that hold you back? If I were to say to you that I as a lecturer would reward you in your next assignment for as many creative thoughts as you could share. And I don’t really mind what they are. As long as they demonstrate creativity, do you think that you would trust that enough to feel that you could open up? Brainstorming is all about opening up and creativity, and particularly innovation. The most innovative companies are cultures that are often defined as open and brainstorming is an example of it.

Questions to Keeping Me Up At Night

Do you trust the environments where you are asked to brainstorm?

What is your personal pattern when faced with judgement-free creative tasks?

Can brainstorming ever truly work in competitive or hierarchical settings?

Where has the fear of being wrong stopped creativity in your own experience?

How do you think AI affects human creativity in real time brainstorming?

Some Suggested Further Reading

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2019) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial.

Grant, A. (2021) Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Penguin.

Kelley, T. and Kelley, D. (2015) Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All. HarperBusiness.

Nemeth, C. J. (2018) In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business. Basic Books.

Sawyer, R. K. (2022) Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation. Oxford University Press.