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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

I think the article’s missing an important trick: Brainstorming establishes a shared understanding (depending on the group dynamics, you might call it a fiction) that the group, not any individual, came up with the idea. That sense of ownership is psychologically important for aligning the group during the execution phase: People are usually a lot more motivated to implement a plan that they came up with, and if anyone challenges the idea, much more eager to defend it.

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Yes, the article almost perfectly misses the point of brainstorming. The studies quoted were for groups solving puzzles, not groups designing tools or products. Puzzles have solutions, products can be entirely abandoned.

Almost zero of the brainstorming meetings I've ever attended were of the kind "How do we solve the well-defined problem X", and were almost exclusively of the kind "What do we want to do in the area of <subject>?" or "Can we agree on needs to be solved, and deal out problems to individuals?".

It's actually unclear what type of puzzles we are talking about. One paragraph later mentions a jury judging puzzle solutions and creativity. We could be talking about open ended puzzles. Think "the marshmallow callenge", LEGO building challenges, or Zachtronics style puzzle games (programming puzzles where you can optimize as much as you want, and the game scores you on multiple competing metrics such as code size and cpu cycles used). It's totally possible to measure creative thinking using open ended puzzles where there's more than one solution, or where trade-offs matter. That mention of a jury judging solutions suggests open ended puzzles are employed here.

Those with enough experience can anecdotally measure the success of brainstorming on projects where they've used it. I'd contribute the un-revolutionary idea that brainstorming works well for some teams trying to solve some problems. The trick is knowing when to use it, not to use it all the time, or rule it out entirely.

Yeah we usually brainstorm to figure out an solution that can integrate multiple groups. You can’t decide these kinds of issues solo

I came here to write this, and also to say that on a software team, for example, where the problem is complex, no one person may have a well rounded enough or deep enough grasp of the problem, goals, limitations, etc. to come up with an optimal solution on their own. This is why we have businesses in the first place, to organize teams in a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts kind of way. A very basic example of this might be a UI designer coming up with a number of potential interface ideas for a particular problem users are experiencing, and an engineering choosing the design which will cost the least dev hours. Iterating on sketches of such potential solutions will almost certainly get to a better solution than the designer just making a choice their own favorite design and lobbing it over the wall to eng.

Not to dismiss the psychological safety point the article makes, which i believe is very valid.

I think we use the term "brain storming" in different ways, engineering teams coming together to flesh out an idea is often nothing like a "brainstorming" session. Engineering often tends to do "cooperative brain leveraging" :)

I’ve been building software for 20 years, and in my experience good ideas come from anywhere, especially on a high functioning teams where everyone is bought in. Engineers in particular often come up with great leftfield solutions, as they know what’s going on behind the scenes and can find way to leverage that knowledge.

I think this article might be something a litmus test for determining if you believe in such a thing as a functional software (not just engineering) _team_ or not.

Yeah, brainstorming has put a bad name on collaborating next to a whiteboard with pens and post-its.

Brainstorming tries to achieve an unstructured creative session whereas engineering teams are trying to flesh out a structured plan to a complex problem.

Not all whiteboarding in a group is brainstorming. The former usually results in tremendous added value while with the latter I agree it's mostly pointless.

A lot of people do this very badly. They craft a brainstorming session designed to arrive at their pre-selected destination. They either design the process to steer the conversation, or shut down tangents as they go. This always feels manipulative and scummy.

But that's not brainstorming, that's something else.

Laundering a pre-arranged plan, aka "brainwashing"

This works on "newbies" until they realize what's going on and then they learn to see through it and begin to resent not only this "trick" but also the people who attempt to use it, which maybe works if you keep churning through people--and this is an industry with enough new blood being injected constantly that maybe that even feels "sustainable"--but I still feel like the people who do it should be judged harshly.

This is a pretty cynical view. It's not actually a bad thing to make folks feel like they have a sense of ownership over an idea; human nature is human nature and motivating people to work hard and feel ownership is its own challenge.

I agree with you. There are enough people in the world who play games to make others suffer that I'm not going to spend much energy resenting people who play games to make others feel good.

I do think the author's final point about psychological safety is a good one.

I think manipulating people into believing something that's not true is a bad thing, even if it improves the bottom line. To think otherwise, I submit, is the truly cynical view.

But it doesn’t matter. If two people think they came to the same design together it doesn’t matter if someone else already did ahead of time.

The important thing is that they have convinced themselves that it makes sense.

You don’t even have to lie. You can go into a meeting as a lead and say that you have an idea of how something might look but you want the group to come up with a design anyway.

> Brainstorming establishes a shared understanding (depending on the group dynamics, you might call it a fiction) that the group, not any individual, came up with the idea.

IME, brainstorming sessions don't really serve that purpose except when they actually do result in real substantive collaboration. While people may have tribal identity as part of a team, they also tend to be aware of the group dynamics in the team and how decisions are actually made.

But, IME, lot of people in lead and management positions buy into the effectiveness of brainstorming sessions as tools of forging shared fictions in ways which are supported by the way people on the team look at the output.

Yep, I’ve got plenty of ideas ready to go. But if I just start implementing them in a silo without the rest of my team, that’s not good for my job or the company. Brainstorming sessions are to get buy-in and validate that things I’ve already thought of are viable and will be considered a group effort.

The devil is as usual in (execution) details. One man's brainstorming is another man's committee.

I would argue that ideation aside, the person responsible for executing said idea needs to have a clear motivation & reward for taking up ownership of actioning it.

Brainstorming might be a throwback term, but it works.

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