Comment by redelbee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by redelbee | Hacker News Reader

How valuable is the “making your team feel good” result mentioned at the end of the article? I think good team cohesion and understanding are valuable outcomes of brainstorms that can be overlooked.

In my experience at an advertising agency “Making people feel good” was the best result of brainstorming, but certainly not the only one. Everyone had a chance to voice their ideas and offer feedback on other ideas. In the end the ideas usually ended up coming from the people who were great at making ideas, and the tactical executions of those ideas came from the people who were good at making ideas come to life, and sometimes they combined to make an even better idea and execution.

As a creative leader I also required each person involved in the brainstorm to do individual work beforehand. Perhaps this is why we saw good results.

Either way, measuring brainstorming success by number of ideas or some other measure of “creativity” is likely missing out on the social benefits of the process.

>As a creative leader I also required each person involved in the brainstorm to do individual work beforehand.

This is overlooked. There's an inherent assumption with brainstorming that you start from nothing and form ideas. The issue is that you need some context around what you're generating ideas for to shape them. It also helps to have time to shape these ideas before sharing them, even at the "first stage." This allows everyone time to form some early ideas and shape them in a way they can easily express them so others understand the vision and can iterate, mutate, etc. around a solid understanding around the shape of the context. You don't need weeks but at least an evening to casually/informally think over things is typically enough.

If you dont do this, you get some initial thoughts with a lack of any data and everyone asking lots of questions around context instead of forming ideas around the context. Essentially, you spend time finding the cursory data you need to have a proper brainstorming session. Then you get ideas that had no time to form. People can typically generate ideas and iterate out sets of bad ideas themselves. The remaining potentially good ideas are the ones perfect for a brainstorming session. From my experience, this is where valuable group brainstorming starts and takes on a life of its own.

I agree with this, also based on my experience working at an ad agency. Particularly the part about team members with different expertise finding better ideas and execution strategies.

I'll buy that on average, brainstorming is an inefficient way to improve the quality of a product, especially if all members of the team are reasonably knowledgeable about the subject. But as the article mentions, that's often not the case.

It may not always or even often result in a better product, but there's definitely value in finding those outlier projects where you can save time and money with an approach that would be obvious to someone with more familiarity with the subject. It's hard to know if this is the case beforehand, so it may be a sensible default to hold a short brainstorming session for any project so your team at least has the opportunity to identify areas for improvement.

Edit: formatting

I see a lot of brainstorming sessions out together to "make people feel good", and after you attend the same brainstorming session for the fifth time and see through the ruse it is like finding out Santa Claus isn't real but you are going to be forced to bake cookies for him over and over again knowing full well it is all going in the trash at the end of the day... at some point doing things to make people "feel good" when you know it is a lie is just being evil. Imagine if a doctor just started prescribing snake oil to everyone and it was being defended as "but at least it makes everyone feel good".

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