brainstorm redux

From time to time I find myself invited to brainstorm for people. This usually involves coming up with new ways my hosts might "add value to their revenue chain" or "leverage their brand." To be perfectly honest, I'm not very good at it. I'll explain why in a moment. First, though, here's a little history of brainstorming.

Brainstorming is a creative problem-solving strategy launched in 1953 in a book called Applied Imagination by Alex F. Osborn, an advertising executive. The basic idea is that when judgment is suspended, a bold and copious flow of original ideas can be produced. It's very much a team effort -- rather than getting bogged down in the judgments, personal criticisms and ego clashes that accompany the ownership of, and investment in, certain ideas, the team acts collectively.

When you're brainstorming, ideas belong to no one and come from anywhere. Anything goes.

1950s America, with its hysterical anticommunist witch hunts, might seem like the kind of place where ownership and individuality would be valued more highly than nonproprietary teamwork. But the template for Osborn's emphasis on collectivism wasn't communism, it was the Army. In 1953, World War II was still a very recent memory. Brainstorming, said Osborn, was using the brain to storm a creative problem "in commando fashion, each stormer audaciously attacking the same objective."

I published an article in AIGA Voice last year entitled "Creativity and the Sputnik Shock." In it, I traced the links between the explosion in creativity research in the 1950s and the crisis in American self-confidence triggered by Soviet successes in the space race.

I pointed out how Bob Dylan's scattershot liner notes to his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, wouldn't have been possible without Osborn's ideas about suspending judgment to encourage ideational fluency; even the term freewheeling is Osborn's, one of the advertising man's four stages of brainstorming (deferring judgment, striving for quantity, freewheeling and seeking combinations).

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to attend an "ideation session" at an address on Park Avenue in New York. The client was a prestigious hotel, and the setting was appropriately sumptuous. Beneath chandeliers, attended by discreet waiters serving coffee and amuse-bouches, a dozen artists, journalists, management gurus, game designers and hotel bigwigs spent eight hours with a "facilitator" called Mike, who guided us through the session according to principles Osborn would have recognized and approved.

We were teamed up, asked to cover whiteboards with elements of ideas, shuffled around, asked to elaborate on other people's ideas, re-teamed, asked to make sensible business propositions ("in the $200-300 million a year range") out of nonsensical gobbledygook, made to free-associate, made to come up with the worst idea possible and then find a good idea buried in it, and so on.

Thinking in teams, and pitching other people's ideas rather than my own, I quickly found my freshest thoughts blending into a kind of generalized banality, a dollar-green cookie dough. Quantity there was, but the lack of a personal moral framework and the impossibility of being negative took quality off the agenda. Like the Sundance Kid, I wanted to ask the facilitator, "Can I move now?"

Why, 50 years after Osborn's book, do I find that brainstorming, far from unleashing hidden originality in me, blocks and banishes all my most interesting ideas? Put it down to the most important difference between 1953 and 2006: the internet. More specifically, the way the internet has encouraged games with personality and personae, with avatars and animus.

In his 1968 book, Frames of Mind, the humanist psychologist Liam Hudson looked at British schoolboys, concentrating on whether they were convergers or divergers -- his terms for two different thinking styles, characterized respectively by convergence toward "one right answer" on the one hand and a kind of riffing, improvisational style on the other.

imomus