Brainstorming: How to Create Successful Ideas

Foreword - Joseph A. Anderson, General Manager, AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors

19

But in 1953 we decided to see whether we could do more about creativity--in a scientific, systematic manner. We assembled a group of experts in the field, psychologists and educators. Some said we could determine and develop creativity. Others said this was doubtful. But we decided it should be tried and probably could be done.

From that start we developed a testing program that has been proved psychologically. It is a test that shows how creative a person is, within fairly close limits. This test has been given to more than one thousand people in our own plants and to probably another tow thousand outside our organization--folks who borrowed our test to try it for themselves.

Then we also began to develop a training program to see whether we could stimulate more ideas in our people...ideas on anything that might help our whole team. More than one thousand of our people have taken this creativity training, and we know it produces good results. Brainstorming is an important part of this course.

We started out by trying the course on our top executives. They were convinced it could stimulate people into thinking up ideas that would help the entire division. From them we went on to give he course to our engineering people and then to manufacturing supervision.

20

I am proud of the fact that for the past several years our division of General Motors has been a leader in the GM Suggestion Plan. This record stems, at least in part, I feel, from the "climate," the idea=atmosphere, that pervades our organization. That, I believe, is the most important single result to come from our continuing creativity program.

Chapter 1 - The Difference an Idea Makes

35

What price can be put on the idea of freedom that made children defy Russian tanks in Hungary in 1956?

The essential difference between nations is ideas; the Free World will stand or fall on the strength of our ideas. In a Hell Bomb age ideas are still more powerful than any other force known to man.

Chapter 2 - The Stork Doesn't Bring Them

40

What had solved his wife's drapery problem was her subconscious mind, which went on working during a week in which she kept house, cooked, drove her husband to the train, attended church, slept, played bridge, ran a PTA meeting. The same illogical mind can solve the problems of mortgage debt, investment, administrative reorganization, and industrial design, if it is allowed to do the job.

Many men won't let it work for them, however. They are afraid of their subconscious. Some feel, like our husband, that the subconscious is somehow unmanly, a woman's mind. Others feel it is frivolous, not at all gray flannel enough for their business. Still others believe it is a will-of-the-wisp thing that can't be trusted, that it will somehow betray them, and that it certainly can't be trained to work in the everyday business world.

They are woefully wrong. Most businesses and professions are guided by the landmarks erected by men who have made brilliant use of their creative minds."

41

The subconscious mind isn't a logical creature which proceeds from point one to point two to point three in a straight line. It's an illogical character who skips from point one to point eight to point three to point seven, trying all sorts of unusual combinations, making use of every observation and stimulus to create new solutions.

This is its importance. It is creative. The ideas that make a difference are the product of our creative minds.

44

Most important was the fact that his mind was open to see the vision. We have to be ready to receive ideas that our subconscious is waiting to give us, and then apply stern judgment in evaluating them.

45

This can operate for anyone, contractor as well as novelist, laborer as well as executive. Ray A. Hammerstrom, a fifty-seven-year-old steel worker for Jones and Loughlin, took a nap one day and had a dream about a switch for the rolling mills. Eleven previous switches had failed to do the job. His dream solved the problem and earned him a check for fifteen thousand dollars from his grateful employees.

47

Every ingredient of life is used in the wonderful laboratory of the creative mind. It is anything but a lazy place. The subconscious never rests. It is constantly trying to fit things together, to see life in a new way, to solve unsolvable problems. Its powers are enormous.

Chapter 3 - Brainstorming? What's That?

51

When was the last time you heard anyone come up with a radically new and unconventional idea in an old-style conference or committee meeting? I can't remember one. Conferences are supposed to stimulate thought, but, as we all know, they usually stifle it.

53

This is the spot Alex Osborn found himself in nineteen years ago when he took over as executive vice president of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world. Conferences were necessary. Conferences were negative. Yet, especially in advertising, new ideas, hundreds upon hundreds of new ideas, were vital. Brainstorming, more or less as it is practiced today, was founded by him as a brilliant counterattack on negative conference thinking. HE noticed that every conference he attended was dominated by a "no, no, a thousand times no" atmosphere. Ideas were suffocated if they were mentioned, and too many idea people who knew this remained silent. The conference was dominated by an individual or the ghost of a policy.

Brainstorming is a strategy with which a problem can be attacked--in fact, literally stormed--by dozens of ideas. The attack can be carried on by one person, by two or three, by an Osborn's dozen, or by even hundreds. The important thing is that the most creative portion of the brain, the subconscious, has its full fire directed right at the problem under attack. Ideas--new, different, crazy ideas--are allowed to get to the subconscious and set off the marvelous chain reaction of free association.

54

Offbeat approaches, silly solutions, zany notions are the raw material of the brainstorm. Everyone is encouraged to hitch-hike on other people's ideas.

58

The difference between Joe Smith, who stays rooted in one spot, and Bill Jones, who moves on, lies in the fact that Bill is a problem solver. He sees problems and he sees unusual ways to solve them. He is an idea man, a person who is first a thinker, and second a doer. The best way you can develop into an idea man is to brainstorm the problems that confront you. If you do this you will have a flood of new ideas, a whole weapon system with which to attack the problems which face you, your family, your company, your community.

59

Another important personal benefit from brainstorming is that your creative skill will snowball. As you learn how to suspend judgment and storm old roadblocks with new vigor, you will do it much more effectively. There is an important lesson in this. People used to think that only a small minority could rule. We in America proved that that is not true. But still people think that only a few people can have ideas, that there is a sort of Divine Right of Intellectuals. That is not true either. The art of having ideas can be taught, developed, and mastered by a great share of our population.

61

Every corporation has a vast natural resource of people who possess new, vital talent. Every company must depend on new ideas, a process of re-examination and re-creation if it is to maintain its status or improve it in a competitive world. Brainstorming is one way a corporation can cut through the forest of organization to find new talent and encourage it. In every department there are people who are bogged down in detail, paralyzed by routine, who have the ability within themselves to produce money-makng ideas. Usually they do not even know they have this skill, and if they do, often as not they feel they have no way to express it. Inadvertently many a company has placed an "Ideas Not Wanted" sign on each executive door. Brainstorming tears down those signs. It reaches the people who can create. It stimulates them, jogs management, gives expression to the creative human resource within the corporation.

62

Brainstorming sessions are much more effective than wastebasket-bound memos, unread bulletin board messages, ignored editorials in the company paper, to make company problems real to employees. When a problem is presented to them, for example, a problem of economy, not as a do-not-touch blast from the front office, but as a how-can-you-help-us appeal from the very top, the response is often spectacular.

Chapter 4 - Mixing the Witch's Brew

69

It would be both dangerous and ridiculous if I were to wrap brainstorming in a cocoon of strict rules and regulations.

71 Nice encapsulation of the central paradox of brainstorming in '50s business. Planned spontaneity. Mass-produced ideas.

The secret of a good brainstorming session, like a good proposal of marriage, is spontaneity. And the secret of such spontaneity is, of course, good planning.

72

One way of fighting this problem is practiced by Harold Schmidhauser, Director of Executive Action courses at the American Management Association.

76

It's often a good idea to have groups of office boys, secretaries, file clerks, workers of all levels brainstorm a company problem. There are a number of good reasons for this. One is that they often have very good ideas. They see your problems differently because of their perspective. Another reason is that this can increase communication between all levels of management. Still another is that they can take part in management and enjoy a sense of participation.

81

The invitation should clearly state the question to be brainstormed. This gives the subconscious a head start. Once the problem is firmly planted in the subconscious, it may chip away at the project as the individual walks through the plant, sees competitors' problems, flies to San Francisco to a sales convention, mows the lawn Saturday afternoon.

Chapter 7 - Ideas? In My Company?

81 Look into work simplification. Perhaps a mix of older notions of Taylorist efficiency structured in a more democratic fashion.

Glenn Cowan, director of work simplification at B.F. Goodrich, recommends that you pick the "burr under the saddle," the problem which is most irritating to your boss. Solve that and you'll get his attention.

Chapter 9 - Solos and Small Combos

162

One company which has done astonishing things with the small brainstorm group is the Reynolds Metal Company. Under the direction of Cloyd Steinmetz, the live-wire director of sales training, creative thinking has been made an integral part of their operation.

Chapter 10 - It Comes King Size, Too

168

The trend toward sheeplike attendance of great masses of people at meetings of all kinds has been a matter of concern to many of the nation's forward thinkers.

They have watched people attending all sorts of gatherings, from sales conferences to religious conferences, people gathered to solve the smallest or the biggest problems of the world--and they have seen them sitting, row on row, contributing nothing from their own experience or intellects. Never do they get a chance to participate.

173

It can be used equally well by union and management, Democrats and Republicans, professional societies and fraternal organizations. The important thing is that in each and every case it makes the participants not just spectators but contributors.

Chapter 11 - Take It Home to Mama

186

Every human relationship has problems, and brainstorming is a tried and tested problem-solver. It can and should be used on the subtler problems of man and wife, father and son, mother and daughter, as well as the mechanical problem of how to make a better roller-bearing.

Chapter 12 - If the Shoe Fits, Put It On

190

I am going to quote extensively from a speech before a National Retail Dry Goods Association Sales Promotion Convention by Bob Cornelius, executive vice-president of Sattler's in Buffalo, New York. It's an amazing document. An early disciple of brainstorming and of Alex Osborn, he has made extraordinary use of brainstorming in his day-to-day work in a store far awwy from the shopping district, which has grown to a twenty-five million dollar a year business and had to have ten major additions in the past twenty years.

199

Retail promotion is just one of the many ways brainstorming can work. BBDO held morning brainstorms for the Republican Party in 1952, a year that was pretty good for the Republican Party.

Chapter 14 - The Compleat Brainstormer

230

If you are trying to improve a toy, you should not only look at it as a toy manufacturer, but as the buyer of a toy department and as his salesclerk. You must also resee it from the point of view of your own production man, and then you must try to look at it from the point of view of the youngster for whom it is intended.

232

John E. Arnold, a professor in charge of the Creative Engineering Laboratory at M.I.T., sent out a "Check List Solitaire" for Christmas, based on Alex Osborn's ideas. It became so popular, he has published it in book form, small enough to be carried in the pocket and referred to when you are actually facing a problem.

239

John H. Patterson, founder of the National Cash Register Company, was walking through his Dayton plant years ago when he heard a worker complain that the foreman would take all the credit for any new ideas. Patterson remembered that when he had visited the Doge's Palace in Venice he had seen a slot in the wall where citizens used to drop in suggestions generations before. He had suggestion boxes put up in his Dayton plant, and today hundreds of companies in the United States follow his example.

Chapter 15 - Secrets of a Successful Idea Man

254 Akron keeps popping up as an unlikely locale for suggestion systems and creative problem solving. Trace thru Goodyear, etc.

I had everyone do this at the University of Akron Creative Thinking Institute and found out that no one had any trouble quickly writing down a number of dreams.

Chapter 16 - America's Last Frontier

257 Good bit of biographical color on how Clark and Osborn got connected.

It was a Saturday night in 1948. I had no plans as I strolled along Market Street in Philadelphia with that special feeling of loneliness that only Saturday night can give you. By accident I wandered into a store and found a book which changed my whole life....

...It was Your Creative Power by Alex Osborn. I went right home and stayed up until 2 A.M. reading it. What was more important, I started living it.

The next morning I decided to call Alex Osborn long distance in Buffalo to discuss the book.

258

This is true because we are involved in a great revolution. A revolution which has created America's newest frontier, where we can all find opportunity, new resources, a fresh chance, a challenge. It is the frontier of creativity.

Until our century creative thinking was the private estate of a few men. Most of the inventions which led up to our modern world were developed by pure and unadulterated chance.

In the past fifty years, however, there came a development which attempted to eliminate this element of chance. We put the scientific method to work in great research laboratories, which organized knowledge into narrow fields and made its explorers specialists, Ph.D.'s with many years of advanced study. This work will still go on, and it should.

But now to supplement that effort we have a new emphasis on creative thinking. We have discovered how everyone, with formal education or without it, can attack his problems creatively. The principles of creative thinking can be taught. We can all brainstorm the problems of our world.

In our democracy we are blessed with the freedom to own property, the freedom to vote, the freedom to worship, the freedom to receive an education. We have the freedom to think creatively, to have ideas, and most important, the freedom to express them.

261

Crawford H. Greenewalt, president of Du Pont, in a speech called "Key to Progress--the Uncommon Man," has said, "...We need those dreams, for today's dreams represent tomorrow's realities. yet, in the very nature of our mass effort, there lies this grave danger--not that the individual may circumvent the public will, but that he will himself be conformed and shaped to the general pattern, with the loss of his unique, original contributions. The group nature of business enterprise itself will provide adequate safeguards against public affront. The great problem, the great question, is to develop within the framework of the group the creative genius of the individual."