Skip to Content
HBR Guide to Making Better Decisions
book

HBR Guide to Making Better Decisions

by Harvard Business Review
February 2020
Intermediate to advanced
240 pages
3h 32m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Content preview from 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 ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives

HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives

Harvard Business Review

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781633698161