Beyond Brainstorming - Large Groups
When leaders, consultants and managers require ideas, they automatically tend to herd people into a room and conduct a (usually ineffective) brainstorming session. One reason for their ineffectiveness is a failure to consider the impact of group size. There is a pervasive belief that creativity is enhanced in larger groups. However, significant data indicates that large groups are detrimental to creative output. Some of the arguments against large groups are: a) The sum of ideas produced by individuals acting alone is greater than the sum of ideas produced by those same individuals when acting as a group. b) Large groups dilute ideas. c) Symptoms of group think increase as a group gets larger due to the illusion of invulnerability, unquestioned belief in the group’s morality and rationalisation by collective justification of decisions. d) As group size increases, the percentage of individual performance decreases. A single person is 95% engaged in a task, two people are each 90% e...