It's time to think inside the box

A new book claims encouraging creativity with so-called ‘blue sky thinking’ doesn’t work — it’s time we stopped brainstorming, says Joshi Herrmann
p85 Inside the Box 29.5 Getty Images
31 May 2013

Throw out your beanbags and squidgy balls, sack your trendy consultants and cancel the creativity retreat — there’s a new theory in town.

For years business executives have put up with embarrassing Lego games and endless brainstorming sessions in the hope of generating original ideas and products. And London’s burgeoning tech start-up scene has only speeded the spread of Californian-style “out of the box” activities that claim they will unleash workers’ creativity.

But what if, as the killjoys staying quiet at the end of the table have always suspected, brainstorming not only doesn’t work but is actually counterproductive?

That’s the bold claim of a new book which aims to change the way we think about creativity. Authors Jacob Goldenberg, a professor at Columbia University, and Drew Boyd, a former marketing executive, claim creativity is actively hindered by “blue sky” sessions and question whether “creative” types are anything of the sort.

“There is 50 years of clinical research that shows brainstorming not only doesn’t work, but it assures that your best ideas actually don’t come to light,” says Boyd.

He cites a study from 2000 which among other things stated: “The evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups”, and that “research shows unequivocally that brainstorming groups produce fewer and poorer-quality ideas than the same number of individuals working alone”.

Boyd says corporate culture has yet to catch up with the evidence, and “the sense that you have to sit on beanbags and toss Frisbees” needs to change if CEOs want better results.

His book, Inside the Box: Why the Best Business Solutions are Right in Front of You, suggests that people are much more likely to come up with innovative ideas if they stop trying to remove themselves from their everyday mindset and instead focus more systematically.

It claims that when Goldenberg studied highly creative products to find out what made them different, he found that they conformed to five simple patterns that can be learned and replicated by any of us.

All of them involve systematic thinking rather than distraction or escape, and keeping one’s thinking “closed” and within the constraints of the problem — distilling an approach called “systematic inventive thinking” that was born in the mid-Nineties.

“We think highly creative people like Agatha Christie and Salvador Dalí had a template or a pattern,” says Boyd. “Interestingly, they didn’t want anyone to know that because the idea seemed to take away from their creative genius, when in fact it does just the opposite.”

In the book Boyd tells the story of persuading his former bosses to spend $1 million on “innovation consultants”, who made staff throw Frisbees around the office and patented the names of their ingenious methods. But after months of work the project produced five bad ideas, embarrassing Boyd and prompting his search for a more reliable approach to creativity.

He says brainstorming tends to fail because it allows some participants a free ride and because people tend to contribute wacky ideas but not feasible, workable ones, reinforcing the book’s claim that “randomness and disorganised thinking impede creativity”.

“We’re not saying you won’t have a brilliant idea in the shower,” says Boyd. “But what’s happened is those inventions that happened through serendipity are so memorable that they get stuck in people’s minds.”

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