A super simple tip to brainstorm better

CURSED JOB! is a section where Olivier Schmouker answers your most juicy questions [et les plus pertinentes] about the modern business world… and, of course, its shortcomings. An appointment to read the Tuesdays and the Thursdays. Do you want to participate? Send us your question to [email protected]

Q. – “It’s disappointing. The few times we have held brainstorming sessions as a team, it has not produced convincing results. We always felt like we wasted our time. How, then, can we find new ideas? – Mégane

A. – Dear Mégane, if it can reassure you, know that it is not uncommon to see participants in a brainstorming session (brainstorming, in English) come out frustrated, disappointed, disappointed. They thus hoped to unearth a downright brilliant idea, coming from Mars or Venus, and only found themselves, after all these hours of intense cerebral work, with a handful of random ideas, at best far-fetched, which would be impossible for them. to apply in real life.

What is this about? Various studies have revealed that two recurring phenomena greatly harm the performance of brainstorming sessions.

– Blocking the production of ideas. People usually take turns speaking in a group discussion, so some are forced to be silent for a while until everyone has finished discussing one point or another. Result? It often happens that interesting ideas are silenced, and even forgotten because those who had them in mind have replaced them with others, the discussion having evolved in a completely different direction. Casually, this is enough to kill ideas which, in the end, would have made a big difference.

– Social inhibition. Out of shyness, or even out of fear of being judged negatively by others, it happens that participants in a brainstorming session censor themselves. They do not express the ideas that cross their minds, without realizing that these would surely have allowed others to bounce on them and come up with a purely brilliant idea.

Even if you don’t provide me with any details regarding the organization of your brainstorming sessions, Mégane, I am convinced that at least one of these two factors is detrimental to your brainstorming sessions as a team. And that results in ideas that are not innovative and realistic enough for your taste.

Now, how do we get around these two obstacles? It turns out that there may well be an unusual way to do this, which I discovered in a recent study led by Sebastian Bouschery, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at the University of Aachen, in Germany. With Frank Piller, professor of economics at the same university, and Vera Blazevic, professor of marketing at Radboud University in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, he wondered whether the use of AI during a A brainstorming session might produce better results than usual, or it might not. Well, what the three researchers discovered should fascinate you, it seems to me, Mégane.

Sebastian Bouschery and his team formed 42 groups of four volunteers to ask them to work on different innovative projects, with the mission of bringing together as many new ideas as possible and generating as many creative ideas as possible. These groups were not all placed in the same working conditions.

– Individualistic groups. Each of these groups was invited to sit in an isolated room, and each member was asked to work on their own, without interacting with the others. Once everyone had drawn up a list of all their new ideas and identified from it the ideas which seemed to them the most creative, a draw was organized to determine which of these were retained to be debated in the group. At the end of this debate, the group had to present to the researchers the final list of their highly creative ideas.

– Interactive groups. Each of these groups was invited to sit in an isolated room, and each member was asked to work on their own, without interacting with the others. Once everyone had drawn up a list of all their new ideas and identified from it the ideas which seemed to them the most creative, the best ideas of each person were debated by the group in order to draw out the cream of the crop. cream.

– Hybrid groups. Once again, each member of these groups had to work on their own before sharing their best ideas with the others. But there, everyone had a particular tool at their disposal: a computer equipped with AI. All you had to do was click on the “Generate an idea” icon to obtain a new idea produced by the AI. Each click generated only one idea; everyone could click on the icon as many times as they wanted. It was then up to everyone to sort the best ideas from their final list. Then, the group had to debate to identify together the cream of the crop.

Finally, a fourth “group” was formed by the researchers, an unusual group: it was made up only of AI, without any human beings. Her mission: to come up with the best ideas on her own.

Results? They are clear and clear:

– Hybrid groups outperformed individualistic and interactive groups in terms of number of new ideas and number of creative ideas.

– AI alone outperformed hybrid groups in the number of highly creative ideas.

In other words, to improve the effectiveness of a brainstorming session, a team has everything to gain from adding an additional member, an AI. Because this will allow him to brainstorm more ideas and bring to light more creative ideas than usual. And if the group really intends to identify highly creative ideas, such as “the invention of the century”, it must know how to demonstrate humility, let the AI ​​run on its own and accept the one or more as a stroke of genius. “incredible” ideas that it produces, as surprising and destabilizing as they are for the rest of us, poor humans that we are.

Good. This is all well and good, you may be thinking, Mégane, but how can you actually use AI during your next brainstorming session? Here’s how Sebastian Bouschery and his team did it.

– They used GPT3 generative AI, from OpenAI, the use of which is free and accessible to all.

– They briefly trained her in brainstorming before the participants could use her. That is to say, they just presented him with the central question that the human beings were going to work on as well as four potentially interesting answers.

For your information, here is what it was about, in this case.

The central question was: “How could we help young people make saving a lifelong habit?”

And the four answers were:

1. Allow the user to share their savings goals with friends and have a community of people who will encourage them to persevere in their money saving efforts, or who will challenge them to persevere , if necessary.

2. Reward the user with a financial bonus if they don’t spend any money at all for a month.

3. Allow the user to set up “fun budgets” (“triggers”) aimed at encouraging them to save more money. For example, each time he pays for a purchase online or with his cell phone, a digital window appears and asks him if he would like to take the opportunity to invest $5 in his savings.

4. Along the same lines, show the user how much money they could save over a year if they decided to give up buying a coffee every time they buy one, or other purchases such as a new pair of sneakers.

– With this data alone, generative AI was able to boost the creativity of human beings, and even surpass it when asked to work on its own, without any human intervention.

There you go, Mégane. The thing ultimately couldn’t be simpler. Get a generative AI like GPT3, warm it up before the brainstorming session, then invite each participant to use it as they wish. I will be very very very surprised if your team does not manage, therefore, to go from brilliant idea to brilliant idea.

In passing, the French humorist Sim liked to say, deadpan: “The imagination puts long dresses to our short ideas”.