I clashed with another BSU prof over the generating of ideas. This was the outcome

Brainstorming is a way of life in many organizations, but can it become routine? Boring? Unhelpful?

Absolutely. A recent article in The Economist shows why brainstorming is difficult to manage and describes how to make it better.

The article argues that brainstorming may include several tensions, and that participants must find a way to balance them. Tensions between:

• Creativity and feasibility (“We can’t do that because…”).
• Managers and nonmanagers (“I’m the one who’s got to make it work, you’re just coming up with ideas”).
• Relying on the standby idea creators and bringing in new people (“Those who understand the organization’s strategy vs. those who from far beyond the field”).
• Different personalities and ways of thinking.

This last one about the tensions in different ways of thinking hit me hard during a two-year brainstorming/creation of an academic program at Boise State.

Week after week, six of us sat in a room with a huge white board, coming up with ideas, looking for ones that would work and thrashing out how to implement them. I was the person at one end of the continuum, with loads of ideas, coming at five a minute. One of my colleagues, a terse, very reserved finance professor, rarely offered ideas. One day, I asked him for some — or even one — and he came back with the ultimate putdown, looking at me:

“I vet my ideas, in my head, before I put them out there. When I give one, I know it’s a good one.”

Ouch.

Another of our members then asked him: “When you write an academic journal article, do you send your first draft out?”

“Of course not. I revise it.”

“But that’s what Nancy’s doing. Putting the first — unvetted — draft out there, expecting it will go through revision. Her ideas are not finished products.”

Aha. Both the finance professor and I nodded at each other … and adjusted, at least a little bit. I tempered my wild tossing out of ideas. He tried hard to put some not-completely-vetted ideas on the table.

In the end, we created something that has stood the test of time, even though we improve on it every year. Our differences in thinking made the program better, and we each learned something in the process.

Nancy Napier is a distinguished professor at Boise State University in Idaho. nnapier@boisestate.edu. She is co-author of “The Bridge Generation of Vietnam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime.”