As unlikely as it sounds, studies have shown that the great ideas and plans don’t come from idea generating sessions.  Although this squelches our belief in the traditional brainstorming session, read on to learn how successful innovation takes place.   

Keith Sawyer, in his book Group Genius, posits that innovation is not the result of a brilliant insight by one player, but rather a result of small and constant change.  He has studied verbal cues, body language and incremental adjustments during team efforts.  He shows that innovation today is a continuous process of change.  The classic brainstorming tool that has been used over the last 20 or so years is less effective than generally believed. While a group process is critical, great ideas and plans rarely are the result of an idea inspiration that pops up in a brainstorming session.   

The more likely scenario is to break down where the company has been successful in the past and find components that can be used as a spring board for group discussion.  Today’s brainstorming session should start with a seed and be built upon by a diverse group of thinkers.  The fact is that successful idea generation actually happens in a solo environment.  So today’s brainstorming session actually should have a starting place that can be built upon.   

An article in the September Harvard Business Review describes “collective creativity” as explained by Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation Studios and Disney Animation Studios: “Creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working together to solve a great many problems.  Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.”   

So introducing your group to a few good starting points and having them build on that is what will more likely result in an innovation for the company.  The group brings its knowledge and experience to the table, giving it a better chance of success.

Here is what Keith Sawyer says about group innovation: “Along the way I collected stories of significant innovations—both historical, like the airplane and the telegraph, and contemporary, like email and the mountain bike. And I made a fascinating discovery: Even though these products didn’t result from a single conversation, their historical emergence followed the same process as an improvised conversation--with small sparks gathering together over time, multiple dead ends, and the reinterpretation of previous ideas.” 

So for your next brainstorming session, try to shift the focus from throwing out many disparate ideas to generating innovative additions to the ideas or concepts that already exist.