There are many situations where we get together in groups to generate ideas. We usually call these events "brainstorming sessions." The term brainstorming actually comes from a technique developed by Alex Osborn in the 1950s following some basic intuitively reasonable rules like listing every idea that comes to mind and withholding criticism of ideas at first.
The problem with group brainstorming sessions is that the technique is often ineffective. That is, groups that get together to generate ideas often generate fewer ideas than the individual group members would generate if they worked alone. A number of scientific studies have backed up this productivity loss from brainstorming.
Because of the observation that brainstorming often backfires, researchers have explored ways to improve brainstorming techniques. For example, research that I did with my colleagues Julie Linsey and Kris Wood explored methods that involve having people generate ideas individually before getting together as a group. That helps to increase the number and quality of ideas people generate.
An interesting study by Jonali Baruah and Paul Paulus published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011 examined the influence of the aspect of the problem people think about on the performance of the group.
Many difficult problems that require brainstorming to solve are multifaceted. For example, if college students wanted to make suggestions about ways to improve their college campus, they could focus on academics, faculty, athletics, activities or dorm life.
Baruah and Paulus had groups of three college students generate ideas to improve their campus. For some groups, each student was asked to focus on a different element of the campus. For other groups, each group member was given all three topics and was asked to generate ideas about each one.
The researchers also varied the relationship among the topics. Some facets of a problem are similar. For example, the academics of a school and the faculty are similar. In contrast, academics and dorm life are more dissimilar. Some groups were given suggestions for three related topics, while the other groups were given suggestions for three unrelated topics. All of these groups were compared to a control group that got no instructions except to generate ideas to improve the campus.
In this study, the best combination of instructions was for each group member to receive all three topics as a focus and for those topics to be as dissimilar as possible. This combination of instructions led to the largest number of ideas, and the greatest variety of ideas. This set of instructions also led to ideas that were generally more original than those that the group with no instructions were able to generate.
What do these results mean, practically speaking?
When you generate ideas in a group, it is often possible to bring together people with different types of expertise. In group settings, each person will use the perspective defined by their area of expertise to guide them in generating ideas. The present results suggest that having people who come from different perspectives can be useful, but it is most useful if each group member first identifies their area of expertise and encourages other people to envision the problem from their perspective as well. In that way, the group gets the benefit of having many different points of view, but also the benefit of having many people thinking about the problem from this diversity of perspectives.
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Another study pointing out how below their potential people live. GO DWTS!!!
( in various ways) female participation.
Send you questions to each one of them and allow them to respond comfortably in their own elements. This will give you the best possible solutions to the questions.
"You will write your ideas on slips of paper and share these with one another. Do not talk to each other while you are doing this. You will each use a different color pen to write down one idea on the slip of paper and pass it to the person on your immediate right. You will then receive the slip of the paper from the person on your left. Read the idea(s) on the slip of paper, add your own idea, and pass it on. If you finish before receiving your next slip, you may use a blank slip until it is passed to you. When you receive your original slips, simply put them in the center of the table. This process will continue until the session is over."
Paulus, P. B., & Yang, H. (2000). Idea generation in groups: A basis for creativity in organizations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 82(1), 76-87.
While an architecture student in college, I -- a hopeless perfectionist who sought a perfect solution to all of my design projects -- always had problems meeting the time constraints. That weakness would ultimately prove to be my demise during my 4th year, since I could not conceive/develop/finish my projects in time for presentation. Hence, though I was trained to be a designer (and performed very well, when I had sufficient time to design), I, having "flunked out" of architecture school, have had to subsequently devote my designing talents to individual, personal projects, such as this running machine, to express my creativity and achieve happiness.
I think it is more accurate to say that that Lobbyists present "studies" to the Party leadership and Congressmen (in that order).
Well, except then people come to the session owning individual ideas and often have a hard time not being defensive.
http://www.thoughtrod.com/idea-software/
I found after using it for 20-30 minutes, new ideas would burst into my mind in an almost unending stream.
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Speaking about his youthful experiments with psychedelics, [Steve] Jobs said, "Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Jobs even let drop that Microsoft's Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." Apple's mantra was"Think different." Jobs did. And he credited his use of LSD as a major reason for his success.
www.thefix.com/content/steve-jobs-think-different-and-lsd-9143
The Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Katy Mullis credits the use of LSD for having helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences.
Music bad! Dancing bad. Every one just stand in one place until you grow old and die.
(Creativity bad.)