Brainstorming Techniques: Creative Methods for Teams and Their Origins

Brainstorming techniques began with an advertising man’s rules

The word brainstorming came out of advertising. In 1939 Alex Osborn, a partner at a New York advertising firm, began running structured group meetings to generate ideas, and participants started calling them brainstorm sessions. He set out the method in his 1948 book Your Creative Power, defining it as using the brain to storm a creative problem.

Osborn’s four rules are short enough to fit on a whiteboard. Defer judgement. Go for quantity. Welcome wild ideas. Combine and improve on the ideas of others. His 1953 book Applied Imagination spread them through businesses and schools, and in 1954 he founded the Creative Education Foundation in Buffalo. Most later brainstorming techniques are variations on those rules.

Osborn was also a keen collector of prompts. Applied Imagination includes long lists of questions to push an idea further: what could be added, removed, enlarged, shrunk or rearranged? Those questions mattered later, because they became the raw material for one of the best-known creative methods taught in classrooms today, the SCAMPER checklist covered further down this page.

Does group brainstorming work? The research

Researchers tested Osborn’s claims almost immediately. A 1958 study by Taylor, Berry and Block in Administrative Science Quarterly compared real four-person groups with the same number of people working alone, whose ideas were pooled afterward. The individuals working alone produced more ideas, and more good ones, than the groups talking together.

Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe went looking for the reason. In four experiments published in 1987, they tested free riding, fear of being judged and a third factor, production blocking, meaning that only one person can talk at a time while others wait and forget. Blocking explained most of the loss. Waiting your turn, it turns out, quietly kills ideas.

None of this means groups are useless. Groups are good at building on, combining and selecting ideas, the later part of Osborn’s own rules. The research simply suggests a different order: generate alone or in silence first, then share and develop together. Most of the brainstorming techniques that followed are built around exactly that sequence.

Brainstorming techniques for teams: brainwriting 6-3-5

Brainwriting is the most direct answer to production blocking. In 1968 Bernd Rohrbach published a version called 6-3-5 in the sales magazine Absatzwirtschaft. Six participants each write three ideas on a sheet within five minutes, then pass the sheet along. After six rounds the group holds up to 108 ideas, typically within about half an hour.

The method suits brainstorming for teams that include quieter members or a dominant boss. Nobody has to speak first, and everyone builds on someone else’s lines in writing. It can feel mechanical in the first round. By the fourth, people are usually adding twists to ideas they would never have suggested aloud, which is precisely the point of the exercise.

SCAMPER: a creative checklist for variations

In 1971 the American educator Bob Eberle published SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development, turning Osborn’s questions into a seven-letter checklist for children. The letters usually stand for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate and reverse. Some versions swap in adjust or rearrange. Each letter prompts one creative change to something that already exists.

SCAMPER works best when there is a starting object: a product, a poster or a slogan. Take a coffee cup and ask what could be eliminated (the handle), combined (a lid that doubles as a saucer) or put to another use. The questions push past obvious answers in a way open discussion rarely does.

Six Thinking Hats: one kind of thinking at a time

Edward de Bono, the Maltese physician and writer who popularized the term lateral thinking, published Six Thinking Hats in 1985. Each coloured hat stands for one mode of thought. White covers facts, red covers feelings, black covers risks, yellow covers benefits, green covers new ideas, and blue covers managing the process itself. A team wears one hat at a time.

The value is in separating criticism from invention. In an ordinary meeting, one person proposes and another immediately objects, and the idea dies before anyone has explored it. Under the hats, the black-hat round comes later, so green-hat ideas get a fair hearing. It is Osborn’s first rule, defer judgement, turned into a turn-taking ritual.

Mind maps and Crazy 8s: thinking on paper

Mind maps start with a central word and branch outward through associations. The British writer Tony Buzan popularized them through his 1974 BBC television series and book Use Your Head. They work well alone, before a meeting, because one person’s map exposes connections a list would hide. A large sheet of paper beats any app for this.

Crazy 8s is a newer sketching drill. Each person folds a sheet into eight panels and draws eight different ideas in eight minutes, one per minute. The format was popularized by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz in their 2016 book Sprint, drawn from design sprints at Google Ventures. Speed forces you past the first idea.

A practical note on running it: the sketches should be ugly. Stick figures, boxes and arrows are enough, and anyone who pauses to shade a drawing falls behind the timer. After the eight minutes, each person picks a favourite panel and explains it in under a minute. The rest of the room asks questions before anyone offers criticism.

Choosing among the brainstorming techniques

The table is a starting point. A slogan session might open with silent brainwriting, push the best lines through SCAMPER and finish with a black-hat review, three methods in one hour. The slogan writing guide shows where that kind of volume pays off. Osborn, notably, set no upper limit on how many ideas a session should produce.