The Two Sides of Creativity and Innovation

Mention “brainstorming” to most people and they immediately think of a free-for-all, anything-goes session in which crazy, off-the-wall ideas pour out of the participants. When thought of in this way, brainstorming meets with resistance from many people who say, “I’m just not very creative” – that is, they’re not adept at generating new ideas on a blank page.

But this attitude represents a misconception of brainstorming – and of the whole process of creativity and innovation as well. As originally conceived in the 1950s by advertising executive Alex Osborn, brainstorming represents only one phase of the creative thinking process - a phase that consists of a group of people unleashing their thinking about an issue and generating as many (often crazy and impractical) ideas as they can.

Yet Osborn realized that a bunch of crazy ideas stuck on a wall won’t by themselves accomplish very much. Equally important to Osborn’s method is the activity that follows the brainstorming session: the evaluation of those ideas to see which ones might be viable and practical, or might point the way to ideas that could work in practice. This separation of idea-generation from idea-evaluation represents Osborn’s key insight into the creative-thinking process. (If you’ve ever been in a “brainstorming” session in which participants immediately criticized new ideas as soon as they were voiced, you can see the idea-chilling impact of trying to generate and evaluate ideas at the same time.)

There are many tools and methods a group can use to evaluate ideas effectively. For example, the group can first establish a standard that any idea must meet to address the needs at hand (e.g., “must cost less than $1,000 and be implementable in 90 days”). They can then judge each idea to see if it meets the standard or could meet it with further refinement and adaptation.

The process of creative thinking, then, requires more than just the core skill of Openness – i.e., opening one’s mind to new possibilities – that I described in a previous article. It also requires another core skill called Analysis – the ability to think critically, using facts and objective measures in order to make choices among options, reach supportable decisions, and establish clear courses of action.

Openness and Analysis are the two sides – the yin and yang, if you will – of the process of creativity and innovation. The critical, rational thinker has just as much to contribute to the process as the person who can conjure up new concepts out of thin air.