Brainstorming Doesn't Work?

Good morning.
"And the beat goes on....................."

I've always been enamored with the idea of "brainstorming" - getting diverse people together to come up with ideas about some subject.  I subscribed to the notion that a gathering of people, interacting with, and feeding off, each other's thinking was a good way to come up with ideas - lots of ideas.

The term was originally popularized by ad executive, Alex Osborn in his 1953 book Applied Imagination and his theory was that group brainstorming was more effective in ideation than individuals working alone.  In the decades that followed his book, the concept of brainstorming became so wide spread and accepted that it achieved near universal sacrosanct acceptance.

Osborn's approach incorporated four basic principles:

• A focus on quantity of ideas; 
• Sessions that forbade criticism of any ideas put forth; 
• Openness to any idea no matter how unusual; and
• The notion that combining ideas would yield better, new ideas

Yet, research has apparently consistently shown that it simply doesn't work as advertised.  As pointed out by Gregory Ciotti in his blog (found on Quora), the three major problems with brainstorming as originally envisioned by Osborn, are:

• "Social Loafing:  when people are in groups, they are less likely to fully commit themselves because other people will pick up the slack.
• Production Blocking:  when other people are talking, the rest of the brainstorming group has to wait their turn, causing some people to lose their focus, dissuading themselves from mentioning them, or just plain forgetting some of the insights they just fleshed out.
• Evaluation Apprehension:  even with criticism of ideas put forth, "contributors know that other people are judging their ideas when they state them.  When you are by yourself, you have more time to build an idea before presenting it to anyone."

Jonah Lehrer in a piece entitled "Groupthink" in the New Yorker quotes Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, summarizing the science:  "Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas."  

Other studies have come to the conclusion that the central tenet of Osborn - the ban on any criticism of an idea being put forth (so as to eliminate the apprehension of being shot down), is the real problem with the whole theory.  The truth is that debating the merits of an idea - even criticizing ideas put forth - is healthy and even essential to coming up with better ideas.  Leher later cites a study by Charlan Nemeth, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, that suggested that the:

"ineffectiveness of brainstorming stems from the very thing Osborn thought was most important.  As Nemeth puts it:  'While the instruction 'Do Not Criticize' is often cited as the most important instruction on brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy.'  She adds:  "There's this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone's feelings.  Well, that's just wrong.  Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive.  True creativity comes with trade-offs."

So, perhaps brainstorming isn't yet dead, but rather just needs to be re-thought, then re-tooled. 

Lesson One may be that brainstorming sessions should allow for the critique and consideration of ideas put forth.  There should be no shame in coming up with an idea that turns out not to be as workable as one assumed early on.  I am hopeful that the Dinner-vention project may yield several new ideas to some specific challenge, and that the dinner guests will feel comfortable in sussing through those ideas in a frank and forthright attempt to sift through what might work and what might not.  The goal of our creative processes should be not only lots of new ideas to choose from, but an attempt to narrow that choice to the ideas that have been thoroughly vetted.

In another study referenced in the New Yorker article, Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern University, focused on the ideal composition of a group that would maximize their collective brainstorming capacity to yield positive results.  He ended up studying Broadway musicals because a successful production required all kinds of diverse talent working with each other.   He ended up ranking broadway teams according to whether they had worked together frequently (and thus knew each other well), had no prior working experience together, or were some combination of old hands and new people.  "According to the data, the relationships among collaborators emerged as a reliable predictor of Broadway success."  When the team didn't know each other well or at all, the musical was likely to fail.  But when the team knew each other too well, had been working together too long, the musical was likely to fail too.  It was those teams comprised of some people who had worked together successfully over time,  combined with people new to a given production, that had the best chance of producing a successful offering. 

Lesson Two then might be that brainstorming sessions that marry groups of colleagues that know each other and come from a single field with others they do not know, and that may come from other fields, maximizes the chance of success.  We don't do that enough in the arts.  Indeed, people in one discipline in our universe are remarkably separated even from people in other disciplines.  Each discipline field keeps largely to themselves, with even their own conference, and we rarely intersect or interact with each other.  That isolation one from the other may be one of the chief  obstacles to our coming up with creative solutions to common problems.  Moreover, as a field we in the arts almost never intersect and interact with leaders and thinkers from fields that seemingly have nothing to do with us.  We ought to figure out how to promote those meetings and interfaces with people far afield from us - sociologists, economists, scientists, sports figures and on and on and on.

Finally, Lehrer also considered the impact of space on how people came up with new ideas.  Citing Steven Jobs near obsession with the power of space to enhance the creative work of groups, he talked of how Jobs purposefully tried to create spaces at Pixar that would force the various writers, computer scientists and artists to run into each other thus encouraging random exchanges of information and thinking.

Then Lehrer cites the history of Building 20 on the M.I.T campus.  Originally a clap trap massive wooden structure designed to house the radar research of the Allied war effort - and meant to only be a temporary structure - it was turned into offices for the scientists and engineers who worked on the radar project.  But because the building was so massive, M.I.T began

"shifting a wide variety of academic departments and student clubs to the so-called 'plywood palace'.  Building 20 became a strange, chaotic domain, full of groups who had been thrown together by chance and who knew little about each other's work.  And yet by the time it was finally demolished in 1998, Building 20 had become a legend of innovation, widely regarded as one of the most creative spaces in the world.  In the postwar decades, scientists working there pioneered a stunning list of breakthroughs, from advances in high-speed photography to the development of the physics behind microwaves. Building 20 served as an incubator for the Bose Corporation. It gave rise to the first video game and to Chomskyan linguistics."

The building itself led to the promotion of random encounters of the kind Steven Jobs would come to embrace, as the occupants were free to remake their space in any way they wanted, and, because of the juxtaposition of incongruous other disciplines without any seeming plan to the layout, the occupants were thrown together in random ways.  It is these chance meetings that urban theorist Jane Jacobs "described as 'knowledge spillovers'" - where you learn something from another discipline that may ultimately be of value to your work in your discipline.  As Lehrer concluded:

"The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks."

So Lesson Three is that the physical space in which brainstorming (whether a one time event, or the more ambitious attempt to create an ongoing creative environment) impacts the kind of random interactions and conversations that are the ecosystem of new ideas.  Alas, in the arts there are virtually no Building 20s.  Our spaces are sadly traditional; separate offices for each of our staff people, and offices that house only ourselves.   We need to rethink our physical spaces and how they keep us from maximizing the facilitation and nurturing of creative thinking.  Isolating people is a now outdated and outmoded barrier to sharing information, questions and ideas.  And while technology and the internet can obviate against some of what is negative in that antiquated reality, it is still the personal interface that is essential to the whole process.

Some observers have suggested that the internet has a role to play in making brainstorming more effective, noting that brainstorming online - using chat and instant messaging and more - may allow people to have the benefit of ideas flowing from different perspectives all at once, without the negative of having to wait for your turn, and less worry about being judged.

So Lesson Four may be that there is a role technology can play in helping us to brainstorm and think more creatively.  We simply need to figure out how that plank is one of the planks in the final solution.

Anybody want to brainstorm about how to nurture brainstorming?

Have a great week.

Don't Quit.
Barry

Further Consideration of Failure

Good morning.

"And the beat goes on....................."

Maria DiMento, in the Chronicle of Philanthrophy, reports on the trend of foundations to open up about their failed projects in the hopes others can learn from the experience.

"In a study released last month, 88 percent of nonprofit leaders polled by the Center for Effective Philanthropy said they want foundations to speak more openly about what doesn’t work.
A growing number of grant makers agree and are seeking new ways to share such experiences openly to help donors avoid making similar mistakes or wasting money on ineffective solutions to social problems.

While foundations have made such pushes before, they have rarely done much to transform philanthropy’s unwillingness to talk openly about failed grants. But it’s possible that the growing popularity of evaluation will lead more grant makers to talk about projects that didn’t succeed." 

There are myriad examples of foundations pursuing ways to address major challenges, motivated by the best of intentions, that - at best - have come up short, and at worst have been abject failures.  Not surprisingly, foundations have, in the past, resisted promoting public analysis of these unsuccessful attempts.  In part that is because foundation Boards of Trustees are hesitant to acknowledge money spent that failed to achieve stated goals, least people think the money is being mismanaged in some way.  Consider this (as reported by Ms. DeMento):

"James Canales, president of the James Irvine Foundation, in 2007 posted online a report detailing a $60-million failed effort his fund supported to improve after-school programs in California. He and Paul Brest, then president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, pleaded with other foundations to be more candid about failure.

But Mr. Canales says he hasn’t seen much change since then. One reason, he says, is that trustees are especially worried that if they declare failure, outsiders will think grant makers are wasting money.

“One of the impediments to our progress as a field is that we’re still not where we need to be in terms of our relationships with our boards and the ways in which we engage our board in the substantive work of our organizations,” says Mr. Canales. “If more progress on that score were made, then perhaps we would have a culture that would embrace and permit us to talk openly about these issues without fearing that the board would be troubled or worry we’re not doing the right thing.”

Foundation presidents and program officers are also part of the problem, because they often don’t tell their trustees about failure, says Joel Fleishman, a professor at Duke University and author of The Foundation: a Great American Secret—How Private Wealth Is Changing the World.

Instead, he says, they gloss over things that aren’t working, because they know many trustees don’t want hear about it and fear of the effects of the public’s learning about failed efforts.

Foundation leaders, Mr. Fleishman says, need the support of trustees willing to “ferret out the truth about the results of grants.”

There is momentum to acknowledge failure as part of the risk taking process, as exemplified by the Duke Foundation's arts funding:

"Another prominent effort to tackle the issue of failure more directly comes from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which wanted to help arts groups experiment with ways to reach more people.

To do that, it awarded $3.2-million to groups for new projects and promised that it would not pull the grants or otherwise penalize groups if their efforts failed.

If a new project didn’t succeed as well as planned, that nonetheless could provide them with a breakthrough insight, a new strategy, a new set of relationships that are going to pay off in the next step,” says Ben Cameron, Duke’s program director for the arts. 'We shouldn’t abandon them just because they didn’t do what we thought they would do.'"

What would be really valuable is more information on why some well intended approach did not work. In one major program - a $1 billion + effort by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to improve the care of people with chronic illnesses, David Colby, the foundation’s vice president for research and evaluation, said:   “The overall effort did not make a dent."   Foundation officials hired an outside evaluator to identify the reasons the effort didn’t work and last year published a 78-page report on its Web site that lays out the findings in detail.

"It concludes that the foundation’s grant making was not as well coordinated as it should have been, that grant-making priorities were unclear, and that the scattershot approach undercut the potential of the overall effort."

While I applaud their forthrightness, more specificity in why the project failed would be useful.  Foundations and funders need to come to conclusions about the nuts and bolts of the "why" of failures.  Was the project too ambitious; too large to address in the whole?  Was the approach ill conceived?  Was there too little demand on the grantees?  Some challenges are so large in the abstract, that even a billion dollars is likely not nearly enough to do much good.  How then ought funders to proceed?

One thing that seems clear to me is that - at least in the arts field - there may be a tendency to seek a solution to a given problem or set of problems, without fully trying to understand the root causes of the problem.  We identify a problem (e.g., declining audiences) and we develop seemingly rational theories about how to address the problem (content with more transformational potential, more engaging efforts et. al.), but often without spending enough time or pouring adequate resources in the harder part of identifying the cause of the problem (i.e., why are the audiences declining).

I have no idea how much money we have invested in the last 20 years to support audience development efforts, but unless you believe those efforts have helped slow down the rate of audience decline (and that can be defined as "success"), then, in the main, those efforts have failed. The audiences continue to decline.  Why is the question.  We need to know the answer, and to the extent foundations that fund the arts are more willing to ask that question and attempt to answer it, the better off we will all be.

And, before we settle on what the causes of the phenomenon on the declining audience are - arrived at by research and study - we need to make sure that research and those studies are credible and reliable and not just attempts to skew evidence to support a pre-determined theory of how to address the challenge.  I know we have spent energy in surveying our audiences, but there is credible evidence that people do not always respond forthrightly to surveying.  We have to dig deeper.

We want foundations to take on systemic change challenges.  But we also want foundations to fund approaches that succeed.  And I have no doubt whatsoever that that is exactly what foundations want too.  I think foundations need to more fully understand the root causes of any given challenge they wish to tackle, before adopting whatever approach they want to embrace.  And I don't think we are spending enough time and resources of identifying the actual causes of the problems we face.

So, for example, if the challenge is to address the declining audiences for performing arts programs, then whatever the response is, first we need more thinking to go into why the audiences are declining.  If there are internal studies that answer, even in part, that question - they ought to be made public. Usually, if they exist, they aren't public.  And it simply isn't enough to focus on one of the root causes of the problem - we really have to understand all the causes and how they interact  - even if we are to limit our responses to addressing but a single one of those causes.  And my guess is that in attempting to affect systemic change, we must bear in mind that the core of the challenge may be in that the situation for each organization is unique, and that there isn't one cause, but multiple causes.

Thus in the declining audiences example, for some organizations the real reason their audience is declining is a combination of factors - some are mundane:  too high a ticket price, inconvenient schedule times, difficulty in parking; some have to do with content that doesn't appeal or excite; some have to do with a failure to successfully compete with other forms of leisure activity vying for people's precious time resource; and some may have nothing at all to do what the arts organization is or is not doing.  If people aren't coming because the ticket prices are too high, or the venue is too far away, or the performance start time is inconvenient, then making content more relevant, trying harder to engage people in the process of creativity or any other approach may simply be a waste of time.  Conversely, if people don't believe the content of the performance measures up against the other alternatives available to them, then lower ticket prices, bringing the performance to the audience and making it easier to attend may be irrelevant.   If we wish to fund efforts to stem the tide of declining audiences, then that funding should support a specific plan to address as many of the identified root causes as is possible.  And, unfortunately, that may be a different process for each grantee.  Oh my.

The more we know about what doesn't work and what hasn't worked - the better we can get closer to something that might work.  Kudos to those foundations that are now willing to not only admit where programs and strategies have failed, but to seriously analyze those failures to learn 'why' they failed.  A good place to start such an analysis in the audience development arena would be to delve into why those audiences are declining in the first place.

Have a great week.

Don't Quit.
Barry

Your Other Brand

Good morning.
"And the beat goes on....................."

Branding:
We talk a lot about "branding" - most often in the context of our marketing efforts.  We seek to build a strong 'brand' that will help us to engage our audiences and supporters.  A strong brand means our product is reliably associated with excellence and value.  But there is another side to branding - the 'brand' of your organization as an organization.

How is your organization perceived - apart from your artistic mission and your product?  Are you seen as highly professional?  Do people think of your organization as well managed?  Is your staff seen as skilled and capable?  Is the organization thought of as flexible and adaptable?  Are you 'cutting-edge'?  What is the 'brand' the organization as an organization has within the field of nonprofits or within any other 'community'?

In part, that aspect of your 'brand' may have a lot to do with your success in everything from fund-raising to audience development.

How is that aspect of your brand established?  I think it is really the sum total of a lot of little things.  Do your people promptly return calls? Are they responsive to inquiries.  Do they follow-up?  Are your reports consistently turned in on time and are they well written and documented?  Is your correspondence professional, succinct and well written.  Do your people write personal thank you notes to people that have in some way helped the organization.   Are your people generally friendly and upbeat?  And are your people on time for meetings and interfaces with other people and other organizations?

That last one seems like a no-brainer, but increasingly I find that people from all kinds of organizations regularly show up late for an appointed meeting.  It's as though it has somehow become alright if you show up within ten or fifteen minutes of the scheduled time.  It's not alright.  It's rude and it sends the message to the person you kept waiting that you don't value their time, that you have no respect for them.  Not only are people more frequently late, it would seem that there is the growing belief that if they are late only ten minutes or so, it isn't necessary for them to call to let you know they are running late.

I have a friend in our field that had his own "ten minute" rule:  if he had an appointment with someone and they didn't show up or call within ten minutes of the appointed time - he left.  He told me the story recently of having a lunch meeting  years ago with a then brand new member of his Board.  After the new Board member didn't show up after ten minutes, he got up and left.  He ran into the Board member in the parking lot who asked him where he was going.  My friend patiently explained his ten minute rule.  The new Board member was incredulous and simply stood there aghast.  But, as my friend relayed, that Board member never again showed up late.

Managers / Administrators:  Teach your people that being late to a meeting (and not phoning to advise his/her running late) - absent some intervening emergency - is unacceptable; that it seriously tarnishes the image of your organization and thereby damages your brand.  And it negatively reflects on you.  There is no excuse really - leave earlier.  Your time is no more valuable than mine.

Pay attention to all the small details that normally we don't think about when considering our brand and image - for it is the aggregate of these small, seemingly insignificant little things, that dramatically affect how people think of your organization.  And those perceptions can impact some big decisions people make about whether or not to support your organization - including whether or not to fund you or otherwise support you.  Teach your people that every interface they have affects your brand.

It is, I suggest, worth a few minutes of your and your staff's time to talk about how your brand is affected by the behavior of all those associated with your organization in all the little things - from being on time, to writing personal thank you notes, to returning phone calls in a timely manner. to dress, to smiling.  It's your brand after all, and it may not be to other people what you think it is.

Have a great week.

Don't Quit.
Barry