“What is management for?” asked the front page of L’Express on November 10, 1969, when “the word and the thing that arrived from America after the war” were in their infancy in French companies. Fifty-five years later, management, its teaching and practice are everywhere. In open spaces, sport, administration, business schools, bookstores and sometimes even in places where you don’t expect it, like these training courses which offer “working on foot with a horse to strengthen cohesion teamwork and rapid decision-making. Coaching galorepopular HR gadget tools, personal development books… Never have executives been so inundated with speeches and pseudo-techniques supposed to make their jobs easier.
Like all human and social sciences, management does not necessarily lend itself to hard sciences. But the numerous research studies published over the past half century – and too often ignored by companies – shed light on which methods have proven themselves and which have not. L’Express reviews some of them. In this fifth episode, it’s time for brainstorming.
EPISODE 1. From Teams to WhatsApp… The damage notifications have on our concentration at work
EPISODE 2. MBTI, Disc, enneagram: the great scam of personality tests in management
EPISODE 3. Active listening, a technique that has its limits
EPISODE 4. Is all feedback good to give or receive?
EPISODE 6. Annual appraisal interview: why this exercise generates “a lot of disappointment”
EPISODE 7. PowerPoint: What Makes a Successful (or Failed) Presentation, According to Experts
“I’m scheduling a brainstorming meeting with the whole team on Wednesday morning.” Get together around a table, with four, six, eight or even ten people for an hour. Think collectively about a subject in a friendly atmosphere although sometimes a little messy. How many times have we actually come away from a brainstorming session with an action plan? “It’s an old debate which scientifically is now more or less settled, but there is a significant gap between what research on brainstorming has shown and what companies do in practice,” notes Nicolas Michinov, professor of cognitive social psychology.
First lesson, contrary to what American advertising executive Alex Osborn, the inventor of brainstorming, argued in the 1950s, groups do not produce twice as many ideas as single individuals. It’s actually quite the opposite, since in 1958 a study by three researchers at Yale University, confirmed by decades of research on the subject, established that groups generally produce half as many ideas as individuals. alone. As the specialist Olivier Sibony reports in his book You will rediscover management ! (Flammarion, 2020), a meta-analysis concluded in 1991 that the loss of productivity induced by brainstorming is “highly significant and of high magnitude”, and “not compensated by an improvement in quality”.
Fear of being evaluated by others
Second lesson, which is not contradictory with the previous one: “The scientific literature is unanimous, whether it is laboratory research or that in the field: people appreciate getting together around a table to exchange ideas”, advances Nicolas Michinov. Which raises a hare: “they do not ask themselves the question of evaluating the effectiveness of their practices”.
Which leads us to the third lesson, the importance of the number of participants. A meta-analysis by two American researchers published in 2007 shows that from a certain number of people, around ten, electronic brainstorming (producing ideas from a chat, a computer system, a dedicated application) becomes much more effective than brainstorming verbal or even nominal (people work alone, and then ideas are brought together).
Several reasons for this. “As soon as we resort to writing, we have a lesser loss of efficiency,” summarizes Nicolas Michinov. By effectiveness, understand the number of ideas produced, their richness and their elaboration. “Electronic brainstorming or ‘brainwriting’ techniques are likely to reduce the apprehension of being evaluated among group members, particularly those who are socially inhibited,” concludes the work of three American researchers published in 2023. If brainstorming Oral is a poor technique, this is due to the inhibiting factors of the group process. Starting with the blocking of oral productions: in a collective, not everyone participates, some monopolize the floor, and while one presents his idea the other forgets his or tries to retain it, then finds that it is no longer useful, and ends up censoring itself. Two other factors contaminate oral brainstorming: the apprehension of being evaluated by others (and that through one’s ideas it is the person themselves who is criticized) and the effect of social laziness. In the latter case, if we do not identify who contributes to which idea, everyone will rely on the others, and in the end we will have less production of ideas.
Fourth lesson, take care of the composition of the participants. “Mixing group members from different departments with varying expertise or personal characteristics can increase the creative potential of groups. It will also increase social connections between members of different departments,” conclude the three American researchers cited above.
Final lesson, research on brainstorming has its limits. In practice, there are things that we cannot do exactly as we do in the laboratory, observes Nicolas Michinov: “In brainstorming, there is often a facilitator who leads the session, in research there is no There isn’t one. But we know that having a person who ensures compliance with the rules is better than not having one.”
Correlate good atmosphere and efficiency
One question remains: doesn’t the good atmosphere generated by these oral brainstormings contribute to greater motivation and therefore greater productivity of individuals? “Certain studies show that the link between the good atmosphere in a group and its effectiveness is not systematic, it is necessary to decorrelate these two aspects,” says Nicolas Michinov.
If there is no miracle recipe for brainstorming, be sure to provide breaks, this will facilitate not only the stimulation of the group, but above all the incubation of ideas. Favor hybrid brainstorming (partly written, then oral), as the method pool (we put our Post-its in the middle of the table, and we see who wants the others’ ideas) or the 6-3-5 method (six participants each propose three ideas in five minutes on sheets of paper, then they pass them on to improve the neighbor’s proposals). Those who value their dose of good humor will be able to continue brainstorming, provided they inject a little more rigor into it. Indeed, certain ideas should not escape into nature, or worse… not appear.
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