Brainstorming? Try doing it virtually

Nuno Sebastio, who's keeping an eye on things virtual and collaborative at  Blogcast, picks up from a Marc Andreessen post from last July about "the virtues" of brainstorming virtually, which Marc pulls from The Medici Effect, a book by Frans Johannson. (Following all that? I barely can.)

Point is that it works and there are studies to prove it, including one we helped conduct several years back. Here's the quote from Marc's post that ought to send you right back to your desk next time you're pulled into a conference room for brainstorming:

Brainstorming [is] used in nearly all of the world's largest companies, nonprofits, and government organizations. And the reasons seem obvious... "The average person can think of twice as many ideas when working with a group than when working alone."... But is it true?

In 1958... psychologists let groups of four people brainstorm about the practical benefits or difficulties that would arise if everyone had an extra thumb on each hand after next year. These people were called "real groups" since they actually brainstormed together. Next, the researchers let "virtual groups" of four people generate ideas around the "thumb problem", but they had to brainstorm individually, in separate rooms. The researchers combined the answers they received from each [virtual group] individual and eliminated redundancies... They then compared the performance between real groups and virtual groups...

To their surprise, the researchers found that virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups.

The result, it turned out, is not an anomaly.  In a [1987 study, researchers] concluded that brainstorming groups have never outperformed virtual groups. Of the 25 reported experiments by psychologists all over the world, real groups have never once been shown to be more productive than virtual groups. In fact, real groups that engage in brainstorming consistently generate about half the number of ideas they would have produced if the group's individuals had [worked] alone.