HBR Guide to Making Better Decisions

CHAPTER 6

BrainSwarming: A New Approach to Finding Solutions

by Tony McCaffrey

Brainstorming, the practice of sharing ideas while withholding judgment, rose to popularity in the early 1950s with the promise of producing more ideas. The problem is, it never worked as well as expected. No study has shown that brainstorming produces more alternatives than people just working alone for a while and then coming together to share their ideas and build on them. Sharing one idea at a time—via talking—is incredibly inefficient. Further, extroverts always dominate introverts and hamper idea generation, even if you have a talented facilitator.

BrainSwarming, an approach I pioneered with my colleagues, directly challenges the foundation of brainstorming by ...