Ideate independently, or in group?

Brainstorming, as a group creative technique to encourage new ideas and solutions for simplified and specific problems was popularised by Alex Osbon (1888-1966), a US advertising executive. The method has since gone through many iterations also inspiring creative alternatives. The ideation-workshop, which is multi-tool and not just word-based, is not a group brainstorming activity. This is because the workshop lets the participants generate ideas independently before sharing the ideas in group. In other words, let ideators work alone first. There is good reason for this approach because there is little evidence for the idea that brainstorming produces more or better ideas than the same number of individuals would produce working independently. This argument is also advanced by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organisational psychologist, and further based on a meta-analytic review of over 800 teams indicated that individuals are more likely to generate a higher number of original ideas when they don’t interact with others*. Accordingly, brainstorming is particularly likely to harm productivity in large teams, when teams are closely supervised, and when performance is oral rather than written. Another problem is that teams tend to give up when they notice that their efforts aren’t producing very much. But why doesn’t brainstorming work? There are, according to the review, four explanations:1. Social loafing: There’s a tendency – also known as free riding – for people to make less of an effort when they are working in teams than alone. 2. Social anxiety: People worry about other team members’ views of their ideas. This is also referred to as evaluation apprehension. This is especially problematic for introverted and less confident individuals.3. Regression to the mean: This is the process of downward adjustment whereby the most talented group members end up matching the performance of their less talented counterparts (Osborn envisaged groups including both experts and novices). This effect is well known in sports – if you practice with someone less competent than you, your competence level declines and you sink to the mediocrity of your opponent. 4. Production blocking: Individuals can only express a single idea at one time if they want other group members to hear them. Studies have found that the number of suggestions plateaus with more than six or seven group members, and that the number of ideas per person declines as group size increases (Osborn envisioned groups of around 12 participants). Given brainstorming’s flaws, why is the practice so widely adopted? Well, concludes Chamorro-Premuzic, brainstorming continues to be used because it feels intuitively right to do so - but just don’t expect it to accomplish much, other than making your team feel good. * https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time

Prompts for ideas

There are many ways to get ideation started using conceptual tools, from words and sketching to modelling and computing, and where analogue and digital are intertwined. As to using words (natural language), development in artificial intelligence, AI, has advanced the early prompt tools such as Google Images, which allows users to search the web for images (since 2001) or reverse image search (since 2011). Here, users can simply click on the camera icon to upload an image and get started. But technology is advancing fast. With the emergence of generative text-to-image systems, such as Dall-e-2 or Stable Diffusion, written prompts, that is, short text descriptions are used to generate an image. In contrast, Chat GPT is a language-focused application of AI, and so doesn’t have the ability to create images with AI. Ideation tools, then, including AI, when there is fluidity between analogue and digital, between words and images, where pen and paper sketching mingles with computing, help elicit creativity and provide  inspiration in both familiar and novel ways.