Since Alex Osborn of the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn
came up with the idea of ‘brainstorming’
in the late 1930s, business has been busy
trying to wed creativity to commerce.
Unfortunately the very nature of business tends to stifle creativity as the very competition it fosters establishes
one of the biggest blocks : the fear of making a mistake.
Brainstorming emerged in the 1950s with a great fanfare. It has genuine advantages at certain stages of problem solving. For one thing, it’s a handy reminder of how rigid we get and how hard it is to free ourselves of rational bindings.
Brainstorming is the technique in which a group tries to make a dent in a problem, by very rapidly throwing up a barrage of ideas.
The rules of the game require that it be played in a short period of time, usually signalled by a timer, that all ideas be written immediately on a blackboard or flipchart where everybody can see them; and that – most important of all – there be no censorship, no shooting ideas down at the time they appear.
No idea, no matter how preposterous, expensive, irresponsible, or even stupid it may seem, is rejected at the time it’s expressed.
In his famous work “By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons” Ralph Caplan wrote:
“… for any group used to working rationally, it’s very difficult to brainstorm without practice. For me, brainstorming is almost always agonizingly difficult, because I have a tendency to want to edit things on the way out. So a lot of ideas
never get out.”
– Ralph Caplan