Brainstorming and innovation: it doesn’t really work anymore
Well, I have a pretty big personal library with over 3 dozen books on innovation. It’s amazing how everyone reads about the same thing and everyone has almost the same advice, especially when it comes to the ‘art of brainstorming’. Still, because of all the new social norms being taught in college these days, where every question asked of a professor, no matter how stupid, is met with; “Great question,” and then followed by nauseatingly improper English; “Okay, then…” followed by a regurgitated response: You’re causing the same nonsense in brainstorming sessions.
Today, the only chance for a brainstorming session to come up with a brilliant and original solution would be to have someone in the group who is already a creative genius who can speak up, defend their concept against politically correct and status quo bias, and persuade personally to the group to do so. give in to your idea. Still, this type of person is a true ‘Thought Leader’ and a legitimate thought leader hardly needs a brainstorming group or any other group in the first place.
Brainstorming doesn’t work for innovation anymore, and these days you can get better creativity out of a YouTube Cat video. Corporate R&D departments aren’t producing much either considering the huge sums of money they spend on the innovative process. Those who predict the future so they can see in the mirror are not much better at using their methodologies.
Innovation for the Future and Prediction of the Future
Let’s take the World Future Society (WFS) Futurists as an interesting case study. The WFS has seminars to teach you to think like a futurist, symposiums with a special emphasis on trend projections and innovation. Isn’t it interesting how all the WFS members are always on the same page and how their predictions are almost always wrong (90% of the time)? Why is this? Maybe it’s because when you teach people to think a certain way, they lose the creative edge or the ability to do high-level original thinking, because you limit their thought process to logical thinking (left-brain thinking) when Students who want to focus on innovation need to be both left-brain and right-brain thinkers.
How are we going to get back to an America solid in its original thinking and brimming with new ideas, a nation that is so innovative that we can’t even stop the rapid changes in our society and civilization? How can we lead the world into the future if we can’t even innovate our way out of plastic bags? Please consider all this and think about it.