The magic number for brainstorming
One of the biggest mistakes people make in group think has to do with the number of participants. Too often I see brainstorming teams simply involve too many people. With the intention of putting a lot of mind power against a challenge or opportunity business people often assemble groups of 7, 8, 9, heck, I’ve seen groups of 20 people bumping into one another in the spirit of more is more.
Well, I have to tell you, at a point in gathering together brains to storm, more is less sooner than most people think.
I believe the ideal number for group ideation is 2 or 3, maybe 4. After that the benefits, if there are any, are far out weighed by the drawbacks.
First, there’s simply the matter of engaging minds, which is kind of the intent, right? With 2 or 3 people, there is no place to hide, no place to be un-engaged. An engaged mind, one that is totally into the exercise has energy and momentum, it’s ever vigilant for creative daylight, ever nimble when prodded in a new direction.
An unengaged mind is flat footed, it lumbers, strays, tunes out, loses momentum (if it ever had it). Basically a mind that is not fully engaged is less productive.
If you have 7 people, break into two teams of 3 and 4 each. I guarantee you will have more ideas overall, and even more fresh ideas after you net out the duplication. Is duplication a good thing? See last month’s post “Great minds think alike.”
With two teams, or three or more teams, if you have the luxury of a dozen or more people involved, you also have a great deal more diversity of ideas. Think of idea exploration like looking for a lost child at the mall. Would you have 15 people hold hands and search together, or would you spread out and cover more possible territory? You know the answer.
All this said, when my fellow creative thinking coaches and I are hired to conduct our FlashFlood Brainstorming, to help a group find an abundance of new ideas, either for new products, promotion ideas, customer service ideas, whatever, we often assemble groups as large as 4 or 5 people, sometimes 6, but never more than that. We do this because when we’re brought in as outside facilitators it is never a casual exploration of possibilities. It is almost always a critical issue which is being explored, where big consequences hang in the balance. So we are not brainstorming for 20 minutes or even a hour, we are throwing gray matter against the wall for 3 or 4 hours, usually. And it’s for that reason we often employ groups of 4 or 5, because if 1 or 2 people aren’t functioning well that day, or if after an hour and a half, a couple are sucking wind, the team can maintain some energy and momentum.
With small teams there is less digression, usually less judgment. With small teams we have a good mix of speaking and listening. While listening is a great creative skill (I mean, it is one of the primary ways we collaborate), if you have eight people in a brainstorming team you either have one person talking at a time and seven listening, or you have more than one individual talking, so who do you listen to?
A lot goes into a successful brainstorming session. Having the right number of people involved for optimal output is fundamental to the process. Because engaging minds is what it’s all about.
