If you work in an function, your boss has probably forced you into a brainstorming session or two (or 12). Brainstorming, after all, is supposedly a killer way to come with ideas, and businesses desire to take advantage of all that commonage inventiveness. Simply it turns out that brainstorming is actually a terrible technique—in fact, people generate fewer good ideas when they brainstorm together than when they work alone. Thankfully, at that place's a better way: a technique called brainwriting (retrieve brainstorming, but with a pen and newspaper and less chitchat). And in a new study, researchers tested out variations of this method to understand exactly how to help people come up with their best ideas.

Flickr user Alexander Lyubavin

Why Brainstorming Doesn't Work
The old brainstorming method infiltrated the American workplace over half a century agone, afterward an advertising executive named Alex F. Osborn coined the method in the 1940s. As companies all over the country adopted the method, psychologists started to wonder: Does brainstorming actually work? Many scientific studies later, they had their answer: a resounding no. Study after study institute that people who utilize this group technique produce fewer expert ideas than those who ideate alone.

This is surprising, since researchers take too seen that group interaction helps people build on each other's thoughts and stimulate new ideas they hadn't considered before. But group brainstorming has many downsides—master among them is that only a unmarried person can talk at a time, which means that 1 or ii people tin dominate the conversation. It also means that while someone is sharing his thought, others might forget their own ideas or the group may get fixated on the ideas people already shared. "Brainstorming is a complex process where people are trying to heed, retrieve, add, interact, build," says Paul Paulus, a professor psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. "It's cumbersome, it's hard psychologically, and people don't do information technology very well." The end result is that brainstorming does the exact reverse of what it'due south supposed to practice.

Flickr user Markus Spiske

A Smart Alternative To Brainstorming
One time scientists realized brainstorming didn't work, they started looking at other methods of idea generation—ones that took better advantage of group collaboration. Every bit Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, explains, "It'due south not that people working together are never good, it's merely that the technique that Osborn developed was lousy."

Over the by 20 years, researchers have discovered a collection of group techniques that they've found are more effective than both brainstorming and working solitary. 1 of the best ones they've devised is brainwriting—it's a kind of like brainstorming, except that grouping members write their ideas on pieces of paper instead of sharing out loud. People and so pass those sheets of newspaper around the group and read each other'southward ideas while they continue to write downwardly their own ideas. This method allows the kind of group interaction that's constructive (i.due east., sharing ideas and edifice on them), while fugitive the pitfalls of face-to-face brainstorming.

Flickr user Alexander Lyubavin

The Testify For Brainwriting
While many researchers have already studied brainwriting, none has studied it in an actual workplace. So in a recent study, published in Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Paul Paulus and his team tested the brainwriting technique in a real-world function—they worked with employees at a tech company that'southward rated among the top 20 businesses in the world. But Paulus wasn't only interested in whether brainwriting worked or not—he too wanted to know if in that location's a certain way of doing brainwriting to maximize the number of good ideas people think upward. So the researchers organized 57 employees—mostly engineers and computer scientists—into different groups. In one trial, they had some participants brainwrite in groups so brainstorm solitary, while the other participants showtime worked alone, then did brainwriting in groups. Using the initial session, Paulus could test whether people came up with more than ideas while brainwriting or working in isolation. And past combining two ideation sessions, he could written report what's the all-time way to do brainwriting: working in a group first then lonely, or vice versa.

Ultimately, the researchers found that if you but had two options—to work in a brainwriting group or work lonely—you lot're better off in a group. The brainwriters came upwards with 37% more ideas than the loners. The team also discovered that if people did brainwriting in groups and so brainstormed on their ain, they produced more than good ideas than when they did the reverse scenario (i.e., working alone, and then group brainwriting). "We've found that what happens is once you've been in a group for a while, interacting and sharing ideas, and and so y'all're alone, there'southward a big jump in your inventiveness," Paulus says. "That's often when the greatest ideas come up." He notes that the alone reflection time should happen quickly afterward a group session. "If you have too much time, you tend to lose all that stimulation—all that brain activity dissipates," he says.

In a second experiment, with the same 57 employees, Paulus and his team tried out asynchronous brainwriting—that is, switching multiple times between group brainwriting and working lone. For the control group, they had some participants practice normal group brainwriting without alternating. The other participants rotated between 8-minute private writing sessions and iii-minute grouping sessions, where group members read over each other'south ideas. The researchers found that the asynchronous method worked much ameliorate—people who alternated techniques idea of .50 ideas a minute versus .29 ideas a minute in group-merely brainwriting. Paulus says that it makes sense why switching between group interaction and working alone might work best. "Alone, you never go other people'southward ideas. And if you're in a grouping all the fourth dimension, yous may spend more time thinking about other people'southward ideas than your own," he says. So you lot become the all-time of both worlds if you combine the two.

Flickr user Alexander Lyubavin

The Caveat
Since the sample size was and so pocket-size, many of the findings weren't statistically significant (except for the asynchronous brainwriting trial). Only co-ordinate to Paulus and other scientists, this is typical for studies in existent-world workplace environments because it's difficult to recruit enough participants compared to a lab experiment. Paulus's study is still an important contribution, particularly since other researchers have already found that brainwriting is an effective method. "The important thing is that this was a real company with real people, working on existent ideas, and we got many more ideas of out them," says Paulus. "So practically, it was significant." Leigh Thompson, a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University, agrees (she was non involved in the study). "They've given us more confidence than what has been establish in the lab can exist meaningfully applied in the real concern world," she says.

It's yet more than evidence that y'all and everyone else in your part needs to stop brainstorming and offset brainwriting. Or as Paulus explains it, "Just because you throw people together doesn't mean wonderful things happen. It has to happen in the correct way."

Mark Wilson and Diana Budds discuss the ineffectiveness of brainstorming