Brainstorming the wrong approach?
Christian Jarrett posted an intriguing research paper summary titled "Forget brainstorming - try brainwriting!". The review is of Peter A. Heslin's 2009 paper "Better than brainstorming? Potential contextual boundary conditions to brainwriting for idea generation in organizations." published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. This study suggests that brainstorming is a process which is well liked by people but is not the most effective in generating many ideas and doesn't compare favourably to people working alone generating ideas. The paper aims to raise awareness of the brainwriting method and suggests that further studies of the effectiveness of the approach are warranted. Brainstorming is currently one common method we use in the lab to come up with new ideas and potential projects to work on. It sounds like this brainwriting approach could be an alternative methodology worthy of a trial run in our lab.
Tags: brainstorming, creativity, psychology
