I love the idea of brainstorming! Pulling all the best out of everybody involved. Creating better solution than anyone alone could. As you probably know me by now, I started digging. Is there a better way to do this? Is there a better way to search for answers? It turned out that we shouldn’t search for answers at all.

Brainstorming

Basically a brainstorming session looks similar everywhere. We get a room a whiteboard a bunch of the smartest people we can find that know something about the problem domain, and let them unleash their minds. Most often we have a central problem that we need to find solutions for. 

Everybody shares their thoughts, about how to solve the problem at hand. Since everybody can dump their mind into it there is a chance to find the best possible solution. Working with all the ideas. We can notice and find some ideas that would remain hidden, and this is the example of meritocracy at its finest. Except that it’s not that simple.

Brainstorming fallacy #1

The most often repeated fallacy of brainstorming is that if it’s done all at once with everybody in the room then sociodynamics takes over. Basically, meritocracy (the best idea wins) is overtaken by tribal hierarchy (the strongest wins) and hers ideas as well. We are too much of a pack animals underneath for everyone to expect everybody else to control our subconscious reactions. 

Brainstorming temple 

To counter that, the best way is to throw ideas in separation. Shielding everybody from influence of the strongest person, allowing the strongest idea to be put down and discussed instead of not proposed at all. But is it all we can hope for? And what about the second fallacy?

Brainstorming fallacy #2 

Even if we get everybody to dump their minds without being held by the strongest person in the room, there’s still a problem. We assume that on their own, people will know how to came up with the best possible answer. That everybody knows how to dig deeper than they ever dug to find the truth. The main problem is that we are searching for solutions and answers and as soon as we find one we will subconsciously stop looking further. That’s much more problematic issue. So what can we do about that? 

Question storming

The problem of discovering the best solution is trickier, so we need a better tool. The tool is question storming. We use the same setup but instead of everybody searching for answers on their own, they question the hell out of it. 

We need to question the questions, and problems and basically everything. Sample questions we could come up with (not the questions you should answer, but which can you create):

• Why do we have this problem ?
• Why do we need to solve this? 
• What won’t happen if we don’t do this?
• What will happen if we don’t do this?
• What won’t happen if we do this?
• What will happen if we do this?
• When do we need to solve this?
• What new problems will our solution create?

Remember that the purpose is not to find answers for those questions. Well not yet at least. Our job here is to create and write down as many questions as we can about the topic at hand. From every possible angle. Only after we question stormed the hell out of our problem we go through them, and only then we are equipped to start.

After we do our due diligence on it. There is a great chance that the problem we will be looking into won’t be the one we started with. And this can save us a huge amount of time and money. 

Summary

Once again even perfection can be improved. We should start our brainstorming session with question storming session, just to be sure that we’re attacking the right problem and that we know what we’re doing.