Looking ahead to a new year, a different approach to generate novel ideas may bring employees, managers and the customers they serve out of the doldrums. Organizations and societies all need good, useful ideas to survive and prosper, with many falling on hard times during this economic crisis. In SMU Cox Professor Peter Heslin's new paper*, he shows how the technique of brainwriting may prove useful for organizations. People often enjoy brainstorming, though it is not as productive as they tend to believe. Groups can potentially generate more and better ideas when "brainwriting"- silently sharing written ideas in a time- and sequence-structured group format.

Given complex, intractable business issues such as rapidly emerging technologies and growing global competition - together with broader societal crises such as terrorism and global warming - generating creative ideas is imperative for organizations. When the stakes are high, group process innovations that enable even modest increases in the quality of ideas available for consideration could be of immense practical value.


Brainstorming or brainwriting?

The most widely adopted process for generating creative ideas within organizations is brainstorming. Despite its immense popularity, when groups of people interact for the purpose of brainstorming, they significantly over-estimate their productivity and produce fewer unique ideas than nominal groups of people generating ideas alone.

The fad of people in manufacturing, service, and public sector organizations seeking team-based solutions to their most pressing problems is soaring. A key challenge for organizational scholars and practitioners is to identify how group interactions for the purpose of idea generation can be made more productive. In contrast to the oral sharing of ideas in groups during brainstorming, brainwriting involves a group of people silently writing and sharing their written ideas. Research has revealed that brainwriting yields superior idea generation than either non-sharing or nominal groups. Groups that contain people with diverse but overlapping knowledge domains and skills tend to be particularly creative.

Brainwriting entails members of 4-person groups each sharing written ideas as they are generated. The first stage involves participants being seated at a table where they write an idea on one of about 25 small slips of paper and pass it on to the person seated on their right-hand side. Accountability is increased by each person writing with a different color pen. Participants are instructed to read the idea(s) on each slip of paper they receive from the person on their left, before adding one of their own ideas, and then passing it on to their right. If participants cannot come up with an idea in a reasonable period of time, they are allowed to pass the slip of paper on without writing anything on it. Finally, when participants receive a completed slip with four ideas on it, they are instructed to read those ideas before placing the slip in the center of the table for all to see.


Although brainwriting might be more productive, people enjoy brainstorming. One reason is that brainwriting satisfies their need for social interaction. A sense of excitement and synergy can also enhance creative idea generation during brainstorming. However, novel associations only facilitate idea generation to the extent that individuals pay attention to other peoples' ideas. Trying to remember an idea until it can be shared, listening to others, and interacting in accordance with the rules of brainstorming also consume mental resources that could otherwise be devoted to generating more ideas. These dynamics also block productivity during brainstorming.

In contrast to traditional brainstorming, brainwriting is typically a more structured and constrained process. Brainwriting potentially minimizes the affect of status differentials, dysfunctional interpersonal conflicts, domination by one or two group members, pressure to conform to group norms, and digressions from the focal topic. It might also eliminate the blocking of productivity, reduce social loafing, and encourage careful processing of shared ideas. But brainwriting requires a greater time, personal, group, and logistical investment.


Adoption of brainwriting

More field research is needed to assess when brainwriting is worth the investment. The suitability of brainwriting for a particular organization could be a function of its culture-whether a market- or clan-oriented organizational culture. Market cultures, as in the firms Bayer, Daewoo, and PepsiCo, tend to display independent and competitive goals, initiatives, and rewards. In contrast, clan cultures reveal more collegial and interdependent tendencies as in the firms of Asda, BMW, and Southwest Airlines. It is possible that the accountability arising from brainwriting in different colored inks is more suitable in a competitive, market culture, whereas a less pressured, anonymous brainwriting approach might be better in more egalitarian clan cultures. Research is needed to discern the best type of brainwriting methodology tailored to a firm's organizational culture.

People in collectivist cultures tend to avoid disrupting group harmony by outperforming their colleagues. A hallmark of high power-distance cultures, typical in Asia and the Middle East, is an aversion to outshining one's boss. Research might explore whether in collectivist and/or status-stratified groups - particularly within high power distance cultures - anonymous brainwriting yields better results than either brainstorming or brainwriting in which individuals' contributions are identifiable.  

Why do managers not adopt such organizational innovations? They often are disinclined to leave their comfort zone to experiment with alternative approaches, if indeed they are even aware that such approaches exist. In the past, researchers discussed how and why brainwriting could be a valuable process for creative idea generation, though lamented that most people who could benefit from it are not aware of it. Little seems to have changed in this regard over the last quarter of a century.


Conclusion

All organizations and societies require good, useful ideas. They also need efficient, politically and culturally acceptable processes for eliciting those ideas. The mission of this paper is to raise awareness among scholars, practitioners, and managers of brainwriting as an alternative to the well-known brainstorming technique. It questions the popular assumption that group brainstorming is the "best" way to generate creative ideas.

In practice, organizations may adopt variations of the techniques discussed in this paper. Brainwriting may be conducted via networked computers, commonly known as electronic brainstorming. While there is yet little direct evidence, Heslin outlines the circumstances under which organizations might benefit from brainwriting.


* "Better than Brainstorming? Potential Contextual Boundary Conditions to Brainwriting for Idea Generation in Organizations" by Peter Heslin is forthcoming at Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.