August 5: Brainstorming Day

Today is the birthday of Alex F. Osborn the father of brainstorming. Born in New York, New York in 1886, he pursued a career in journalism but eventually found himself working in business, first in sales and then in advertising.

In 1938 the advertising company that he founded (Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn) began using an organized method of generating ideas. Although Osborn is credited with coining the word for this technique, brainstorming, he never took full credit for the word; instead, he acknowledged his colleagues who along with Osborn used their brains to attack or storm a problem. Osborn also credited religious leaders in the East, saying that that Hindu teachers in India used a similar technique for more than 400 years. In India it was called Prai-Barshana: Prai for "outside yourself" and Barshana for "question."

Regardless of where the word came from, brainstorming is a vital technique for generating ideas in business, government, and especially for writing.

Typically brainstorming sessions work best in small groups, so that the individuals can join forces and build on the ideas of other in the group. The goals is to create a list of ideas that has flexibility and fluency. Fluency means the number of ideas generated, and flexibility means how different the ideas are from each other and how different they are from what most people think up.

In order to create a list of ideas that has flexibility and fluency, follow these rules:

1. Defer judgment. Don't edit, eliminate, or hold back any ideas. Criticism kills participation, and often an idea that looks bad at first turns out to be a good one in the long run. Osborn used the following analogy to illustrate the need to put criticism aside when brainstorming:

If you try to get hot and cold water out of the same faucet at the same time, you will get only tepid water. And if you try to criticize and create at the same time, you can’t turn on either the cold enough criticism or the hot enough ideas. So let’s stick solely to ideas-lets cut out all criticism during this session.

2. Go for quantity of ideas. The more ideas, the greater the likelihood that some of those ideas will be good. A good analogy for this is a professional photographer who takes hundreds of pictures, knowing that only a very small percentage of those pictures will be worth keeping.

3. Encourage wild, exaggerated ideas. Free from the criticism and logic of the left brain, the right side of the brain, the creative side, will have a higher likelihood of creating something new. Image how absurd the initial idea of selling bottled water must have been? Why would people pay for water when they can get it free from the tap? Alex Osborn believe in the power of the human imagination to generate new ideas that can change our lives for the better. His 1953 book Applied Imagination is a pioneering work in the field of creativity. In this book he outlines techniques like brainstorming that help us to enter into the creative mindset and stay there for a longer period of time.

Today's Challenge: The Forecast Calls for Brainstorming

Brainstorming is an important prewriting technique for writers. The more time you spend brainstorming, the higher the chances that you will find something that is really worth writing about. Below are 10 questions for brainstorming. Get a small group together, or practice on your own. Use the rules for brainstorming to generate a large list of ideas that has both fluency and flexibility.

1. What are some ways we might improve the #2 pencil?

2. What would be the best opening scene for a suspense film?

3. In the opening sentences of a novel, the main character takes off his shoes and socks and ties the two sock into a knot. Why is he doing this?

4. If we divided blogs into three or more different categories, what might those three categories be?

5. What are the similarities and differences between cats and dogs?

6. What are some examples of stupid things that otherwise intelligent people sometimes do by mistake?

7. What are the three most important steps in studying for a test?

8. What will you see on the Internet five year from now that you don't see today?

9. Imagine that next year, 8-track tapes make a big comeback. Why might this happen?

10. What would be an interesting question for brainstorming in a small group?

Quote of the Day: It's the miner's headlamp, not the eureka flash, that drives reliable innovation. The process of innovation is the sweaty work of digging through tons of information to find a few golden nuggets -- mainly unlikely knowledge combinations. \

--T George Harris

1 - Gurule, Jason. "Alex F. Osborn." The seminar on Theories of Persuasive Communication and Consumer Decision-Making for Dr. John Leckenby at the University of Texas at Austin. http://www.ciadvertising.org/student_account/spring_02/adv382j/jagurule/Osborn/osbornfront.html