Washington Post: Why Brainstorming Doesn’t work

Here’s an interesting article in the Washington Post about why brain storming doesn’t work.

Evidence has long shown that getting a group of people to think individually about solutions, and then combining their ideas, can be more productive than getting them to think as a group. Some people are afraid of introducing radical ideas in front of a group and don’t speak up; in other cases, the group is either too small or too big to be effective.

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Kohn and Smith believed the cause might be due to “cognitive fixation,” or the concept that, when exposed to group members’ ideas, people focused on those and blocked other types of ideas from taking hold.