From the brainstorming session, ‘ideas’ were passed up to various committees and were either deemed inappropriate for the organisation’s mission, or adopted but so burdened by bureaucracy that all the creative energy of the idea was sucked out of it.

Brainstorming can work only if the environment is a creative one and allows for lateral thinking!

Workshop are time expensive for the ten or twelve participants. A specialist experienced facilitator is normally used who will also have a note taker.

If a facilitator is sourced externally, he/she should submit appropriate handling methodologies for dealing with these issues. In view of the paucity of studies on knowledge elicitation the methodology used should be fully documented to allow retrospective evaluation of the effectiveness and accuracy of different techniques.

a) Participants believe that their view is “out on a limb” from the rest of the group.
b) Participants may believe that they will be subject to ridicule for expressing an alternative view.
c) Participants may think that others have already said “it”, or thought about it because it seemed so obvious, and that the idea must have been rejected for “good” reasons.
d) They may have “trading agreements” with the others in the group that would be broken if they expressed a view that opposes that of their trading partners – to do so would have consequences for support on other issues.
e) To dissent from the view of the group may put team cohesiveness at risk – threatening established order.
f) It damages the amity of the team.
g) Participants may be frightened of reprisals for expressing a particular view that is thought to be counter to the prevailing view of those in power.
h) May demonstrate weaknesses or knowledge/experience etc., deficiencies of the participant.
i) Drawing on research in cognitive sciences on pattern recognition and visual perception, the practice of plotting, on a white-board, of probability (y-axis) and £-impact – log scaled (x-axis) may influence the risk assessments vis a vis relative positioning and density of the plot points for reasons such as symmetry and balance.
j) Major infrastructure cost over-runs are regularly in the range of 25 – 600%, Flyvberg identifies over-optimism as the single greatest because of over-estimation; this may flow from the points listed above.
k) Group assessments tend to give extreme values greater credence i.e. approaching 0 or 1.
l) Social norms of the group can discourage the extent to which the thinking of each of individuals in the group is used in the group decision making.
m) Existing social processes and social relationships encourage only shallow thinking to surface.
n) Group decision making often results in higher risk decisions being taken because of the shared responsibility and hence, less liability, than that of the individual decision maker.
o) There is research to indicate that workshops and group brain-storming sessions do not produce any more creative thinking or better results than that produced by the individuals alone.
p) Participant selection is a key issue to be explored further in the context of management v. Front-line executive. Also how expert are the experts?
q) Over-emphasis placed on the value and out-put of workshops by managers and decision makers.
r) Risk consultants over-emphasise the value of risk workshops because they generate revenue from running them.
s) Attendees of risk workshops are keen to achieve a consensus, right or wrong, in order to get back to work that they feel is more important i.e. risk workshops are perceived time wasting etc…

During my years in the corporate world, I realized that coming up with brilliant ideas and solutions is easy. Sometimes you just need to think outside the box. Sometimes the answer is “right there in front of your nose”.

There is no need to group people up and get them to brainstorm. Ownership of an idea gets blurry in brainstorming, and this makes other people “lazy” or unmotivated to come up with brilliant ideas and solutions.

Brainstorming is something you do when you haven’t a clue how to approach the problem and you want to waste some time until you get a clue, but it doesn’t really help you get a clue faster. You might as well take a nap and hope to wake up suddenly with a eureka, when you’re napping your brain has a chance to work in peace without brainstorm debris, or better yet as a colleague for a clue or work on another problem you have a clue about.

Brainstorming is for the clueless.