De mythe van de brainstorm en wat wel werkt

Geplaatst op door

Kwam via mijn goede vriend Wannes (@doubleyouone) op dit boeiende artikel terecht over de mythe van de Brainstorm.

Enkele quotes:

Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized 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.”

Wat wel klopt is dat we gaandeweg meer zijn gaan samenwerken, zeker in de wetenschap waar een stille eenzame genie al lang niet meer bestaat. En er zijn wel mogelijkheden die werken, maar deze verschillen van de traditionele brainstorm:

In 2003, Charlan Nemeth, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, divided two hundred and sixty-five female undergraduates into teams of five. She gave all the teams the same problem—“How can traffic congestion be reduced in the San Francisco Bay Area?”—and assigned each team one of three conditions. The first set of teams got the standard brainstorming spiel, including the no-criticism ground rules. Other teams—assigned what Nemeth called the “debate” condition—were told, “Most research and advice suggest that the best way to come up with good solutions is to come up with many solutions. Freewheeling is welcome; don’t be afraid to say anything that comes to mind. However, in addition, most studies suggest that you should debate and even criticize each other’s ideas.” The rest received no further instructions, leaving them free to collaborate however they wanted. All the teams had twenty minutes to come up with as many good solutions as possible.

The results were telling. The brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, but teams given the debate condition were the most creative by far. On average, they generated nearly twenty per cent more ideas. And, after the teams disbanded, another interesting result became apparent. Researchers asked each subject individually if she had any more ideas about traffic. The brainstormers and the people given no guidelines produced an average of three additional ideas; the debaters produced seven.

Verder beschrijft het artikel dat het belangrijk is dat kenniswerkers bij elkaar in de buurt werken zodat ze elkaar kunnen ontmoeten, maar op een goede afstand zodat ze elkaar niet storen.

The best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten metres of each other; the least cited papers tended to emerge from collaborators who were a kilometre or more apart. “If you want people to work together effectively, these findings reinforce the need to create architectures that support frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions,” Kohane says. “Even in the era of big science, when researchers spend so much time on the Internet, it’s still so important to create intimate spaces.”
 
Lees zeker ook de rest van het artikel, zeer verhelderend ook naar architectuur van bijvoorbeeld werk- en schoolruimtes!

Een gedachte over “De mythe van de brainstorm en wat wel werkt”

  1. Pingback: Het Geheim van de Smartphone in de klas – Annette Dölle

Geef een reactie