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Alex Osborn was a partner at BBDO and had many secrets to his brainstorming sessions. The most important rule: don't criticize each other.

In 2003, Charlan Nemeth, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, put that to the test. She had folks brainstorm a problem. One group was told not to criticize the ideas, the other group told: "you should debate and even criticize each other's ideas."

The group told to debate and criticize each other?

Generated 20% more ideas. And when asked for more ideas after the experiment was over, again, the critical/debating group produced on average of 7 more ideas each vs. the "don't criticize each other" group of 3 ideas each.

Criticism and argument didn't kill creativity, it created even more of it. Osborn's ideas, though well intended, don't exactly all work when tested.

I increasingly find that the best companies/organizations are simply those groups that now how to argue well.

I recently took over Highrise from Basecamp and so being a long time 37signals/Basecamp fan I have this weird "almost" 3rd party perspective now getting to see how things work on the inside.

The early founders/employee trio of Jason Fried/DHH (the co-founders) and Ryan Singer argue. A lot. It was surprising at first. It was a handful of months before launching their latest version of Basecamp, Basecamp 3. And they were in a conference room, and though all the walls in this Basecamp office are made of sound dampening cork, you could hear them arguing. Strong opinions about some feature that was necessary, and someone else thought wasn't. When they broke for lunch, you could feel the heat come out of that room.

I went to lunch with them and it was like no argument even happened. We had a pleasant, fun, meal amongst friends.

And I keep seeing this in the way the chew on their ideas. Nothing is sacred. But they realize how talented each other is and the rest of their team. There's nothing personal about the arguments. A huge reason I think their stuff is designed so well is that the stuff that stands the barrage of attack is the good stuff. The stuff that doesn't gets iterated on or thrown out and the stakeholder moves onto something else.

You hear a lot of this at Pixar too amongst the creators (http://www.fastcompany.com/3027135/lessons-learned/inside-th...) and even when Catmull had to argue with Jobs http://firstround.com/review/Spark-Creativity-with-These-Tip...)

So, want to get more creative and have better decisions. Probably don't go the route of censoring argument; get better at arguing.

5 comments

>"I increasingly find that the best companies/organizations are simply those groups that now how to argue well."

While I agree with this point, I think it is only one piece of the puzzle. In order to have productive "arguments" it is important to also make sure you provide an environment conducive to it. That means finding ways to eliminate concerns one might have with "arguing against a boss or executive's point" due to fear of risking their job, or simply being steamrolled due to rank. Cultures that place a strong emphasis on building consensus can also breed situations where people don't speak against someone because they are playing things politically and need that person's support for their own pet project and don't want to risk giving up that capital just to voice a contrarian opinion.

Beyond that, it also takes the right temperament of people in the room. I've worked with some people that I can only classify as "overly-sensitive." They are very passive-aggressive people, and read into any random negative thing they hear as a personal attack against them. There's simply no effective way to have a constructive debate with people like that in my experience.

But I do agree that this sort of "bare it all" dialogue is critical to moving things forward. The real question I have is how to transform an organization or team to that state in as painless a way as possible.

> The real question I have is how to transform an organization or team to that state in as painless a way as possible.

Or even get them to consider the possibility that the organization might suffer from the problem in the very slightest, let alone solve it.

Had tons of interesting, but half-baked ideas be needlessly postponed because of - I think - too much criticizing too early.

I guess the trick is "how to criticize the right way". Criticizing is very important - after the idea has enough to stand on; if you're looking into something which has lots of "don't know how this could be done" parts, it's not the right moment. At this time the idea needs not a critique, but a collaboration on how certain unsolved problems can move forward.

There is a crucial element of that form of criticism, which is that it is played like a game: There is a definite time and place, a magic circle, and when it's over everything is "reset" and you just have a project artifact and happy workers.

Compare with a boss walking up on the floor and bellowing, "so, why is it late???" Now the whole office is cued in to maneuver and deflect blame, not just that one time but throughout the day, every day, until they leave the job entirely.

Really good leadership understands how to maintain the atmosphere for the situation. They can turn up the heat but do so judiciously. They have to do it with care precisely because the individuals tend to be a "bag of emotions", easily swung off track with careless dialogue.

The Reddit thread is cautionary towards a neutral business situation where the goals are simply to maintain trust, gather basic information, and assign tasks and plans. Confrontation in that instance is quite destructive.

What happened to the quality of ideas in that study? In contrarian work cultures, the loudest and most aggressive voices win out. Maybe they "came up with" more ideas because one or two people totally steamrolled the discussion, but that says nothing about their quality or even their level of creativity. Just a thought.

the problem is that direct criticism turns into language that is insulting, or that can be interpreted as such. a lot of people do not have the social skills to participate in this strategy effectively. if you're worked in this industry for any significant length of time, i think you know the kind of person i'm referring to.

i'm sure the 37signals founders and senior executives have these skills, built up over a decade or more of banter and working together. the danger comes when you put junior employees, socially awkward employees, or perfect strangers into a room and tell them to start breaking down each others' input.