The Birth of Brainstorming
Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts,
As the chairman and cofounder of the powerhouse ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO), Alexander Faickney Osborn oversaw a portfolio that included General Electric, General Motors, Lucky Strike, Lever Brothers, and DuPont. Osborn was not known as a "creative man," the industry term for a copywriter or an artist, but he believed he had discovered the secrets of creative thinking.
In 1942 he had written a slim volume called How to Think Up, introducing a method called "brain-storming." Whenever BBDO execs were stumped for a new slogan or marketing concept, he explained, they would gather "about a dozen youngsters and a few ‘brass hats’ " in a conference room or a private residence after work. Supper, coffee, and dessert would be served by an "attractive dietician." Once everyone was comfortable and relaxed, an appointed "chairman" would pose the problem and ask the group to call out as many ideas as they could think up, rapid fire. ("Brain-storming" was meant to invoke the way troops might storm a beach). For the duration of the session, the normal hierarchy was suspended—"all are equal"—but rules were strictly enforced: criticism or second guessing was strictly forbidden, "freewheeling" encouraged—no idea was too silly or ambitious—and participants were encouraged to build off of or recombine the ideas of others. Above all, brainstorming was about quantity.
As ideas came pouring out a secretary would jot them down and later pass the list, perhaps several pages long, to an executive, who would, in the light of a new day, sort the good from the bad. Osborn believed the mind, like the advertising agency itself, was made up of a "creative" or "imaginative" half and a "rational" or "judicial" half. Both were necessary but needed to get out of each other’s way to do their jobs. The modern workplace, like the modern mind, had overdeveloped the judgmental half to the detriment of the creative, and brainstorming was just one way to compensate. In a series of books including Your Creative Power: How to Use Your Imagination (1948), Wake Up Your Mind: 101 Ways to Develop Creativeness (1952), and the book that would become the "bible" of creative thinking, Applied Imagination (1953), Osborn made the case that creative thinking was no mystery, and not reserved for the special few, but that coming up with ideas was a skill that anyone could develop and deliberately apply.
In 1954, at the age of sixty-six, Osborn retired from BBDO and founded the Creative Education Foundation (CEF), to "enhance public awareness of the importance of creativity" by distributing literature, sending brainstorming trainers across the world, and hosting an annual week-long Creative Problem-Solving Institute (CPSI) in Buffalo.
Though his main acolytes and early adopters came from the upper management of some of the largest corporate, government, and military organizations, Osborn aspired to nothing less than a revolution in American society. He believed that by helping Americans put knowledge about creativity to practical use he could help solve every kind of problem, from marital disputes to the Cold War.
Some skeptics in academia and business would see brainstorming as at best another fad, like skateboarding or hula hoops, and at worst a false substitute for true creativity. But Osborn’s blend of freewheeling, almost hedonistic methods with an unapologetically practical, old-school self-help message resonated in postwar America.
In the tradition of self-help writers from Benjamin Franklin to Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, whose aphorisms he was fond of quoting, Osborn was adapting traditional bourgeois values to a modern corporate reality. Through the decades, self-help authors had helped members of the growing urban white-collar class see themselves as independent smallholders despite feeling increasingly like slaves to a system they could neither control nor understand. Using rags-to-riches anecdotes to demonstrate that everyone is master of his own destiny, the genre is paradoxically democratic yet elitist, naturalizing systemic inequalities and narrowing the scope of critique to the level of individual conduct, casting any failures as personal ones. Osborn was in many ways perpetuating the republican ideal of the yeoman farmer, but instead of little plots of land people had their minds, and ideas were the crops. There was no room in this post-materialist worldview for factors like resources, time, power, and politics, nor even for things like education, hard work (in the traditional sense), tact, foresight, courage, or dumb luck. "Up the ladder of business, ideas can serve as rungs," he wrote. "Ideas, more than luck, will land the job you want."
For Osborn, feats great and small came down to ideas: from the wheel to the atom bomb, from Churchill to Eli Whitney to Grant Wood to the urban planner Robert Moses, he wrote, "civilization itself is a product of creative thinking." It was a claim as uncontroversial as it was astonishing. By insisting that everything from scientific theories to battlefield maneuvers to consumer gadgets to parenting tricks were the results of "creative thinking," Osborn reduced each particular feat to an interchangeable unit called the "idea," which anyone could have. This was the dignifying sleight of hand, the flattering oversimplification behind Osborn’s formula. By putting brainstorming in the same class as a Shakespearean sonnet, or rather, by implying that whatever Shakespeare was doing when he wrote a sonnet was essentially what one did while brainstorming, Osborn invited his readers to see their workaday problem solving and slogan finding as little steps in the grand march of civilization.
His whole idea of "an idea"—a line or two of text signifying an easily digested message or an easily executed course of action—bore the marks of its business-world templates: the Madison Avenue slogan mill and what were then known as corporate suggestion systems. Suggestion systems proliferated during World War II when, racing to fulfill ambitious production goals with shortages of materials and manpower, many companies began tapping the rank-and-file employees for ideas on how to speed up or improve production. With the coordination of the War Production Board, special boxes began to appear on factory floors in which workers could drop a slip of paper letting management know their ideas. Posters declared, "Uncle Sam Wants Your Ideas!" and CEOs insisted "for victory’s sake, let us put our imaginations on overtime!" Workers had generally jealously protected shop floor knowledge, knowing that whatever they ceded to management would likely be used against them in the form of speed-ups, routinization, or job elimination. Now, managers hoped, the temporary wartime unity might provide a rare moment of accord, and workers might be willing to give up some shop floor knowledge.
Osborn excitedly pointed to suggestion systems as evidence that ideas could be a source of extra cash or even a leg up to the middle class. General Motors was offering a $1,000 war bond for every useful idea (those already being paid for their ideas, such as engineers, designers, and managers, were not eligible), and within five months they were reportedly receiving two hundred suggestions a day. Osborn reported that a number of factory workers—"amateurs," not "professional thinker-uppers"— had already benefited. A Goodyear plant worker from Akron paid for a medical operation from his suggestion earnings. A group of women, though "not…so skillful as men at describing their ideas," had discovered a better method for painting aircraft hoses. Others were rumored to have won promotions to supervision and design. Though these ordinary men and women would never have their name on the company, Osborn reassured his readers that by using their "unsuspected ability and talent" they were joining the Goodyears and Edisons in the great tradition of American ingenuity.
Some readers may have felt something patronizing and patrician about this recent "discovery" that common people could have good ideas too—overlooking the hundred-plus years of strongarmed de-skilling by capitalists and their hired managers that reduced workers to mere operators in the first place. Though it’s hard to imagine many were genuinely surprised to learn they were capable of original thought, it may have been a while since they had been asked to have a good idea, at least on the job, and there must have been something surprising, or at least encouraging, about Osborn’s pitch that he had a system for getting the rust off the old imagination.
But Osborn was writing as much for employers as for employees. "Employers are hungry for ideas from the rank and file," Osborn wrote. "But they are not good bosses unless they try hard to draw out, and know how to draw out, the imaginative talent of every man and woman on the pay roll." Ultimately it would not be with the blue-collar rank and file that Osborn’s ideas took off, but with white-collar workers, and especially with those in charge of them.
Between late 1955 and 1958 brainstorming was everywhere. A front-page story in the Wall Street Journal on December 5, 1955 read, brainstorming: more concerns set up free-wheeling ‘think’ panels to mine ideas—ethyl gets 71 ideas in 45 minutes: reynolds metals develops marketing plans. One executive was quoted as saying, "Our experience definitely proved you can use this method to get profitable ideas from the lower ranks of your organization."
In May 1956, the New York Times, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and Life all reported that the Navy had brought in Charles H. Clark of the Ethyl Corporation, a close Osborn associate and one of brainstorming’s most avid evangelists, to generate "more Washington imagination in meeting the new Communist tactics." federal ‘brains’ brace for storm: apostle of madison avenue technique to try to stir up sluggish thinkers, ran the Time headline. In January 1958 the ladies’ magazine McCall’s convened a panel of sixteen women to "try a technique called ‘brain-storming,’" facilitated by a CEF representative, to come up with ways to find a husband. The women came up with a whopping 404 suggestions, including "have your car break down at strategic locations," "get a job in a medical, dental, or law school," and "don’t be afraid to associate with more attractive girls; they may have some leftovers."
Such articles often read like press releases. Behind the scenes the CEF was hard at work, pursuing Osborn’s mission with a salesman’s doggedness and an adman’s knack for the well-placed pitch. They solicited friends in the press, wrote guest columns, and even lobbied to have "brainstorming" added to the dictionary (in 1962 they succeeded, with a note from Merriam-Webster assuring them that their suggested language would be taken into account). CEF associates scattered across the map conducting demonstrations for audiences such as the Passaic Township Public Schools, the Atomic Energy Division of the Babcock & Wilcox Company, the Cornell University Psychology Department, and the Church of Latter-Day Saints. One ambassador reported from the field that he had run brainstorming demos for "a high school student council, four Federal Management Seminars, a number of professional associations, several groups of government officials from Pakistan, and various service clubs," and was on his way to an engagement with top city officials from Beverly Hills.
The campaign evidently generated excitement. "My creative imagination is soaring and I owe it all to you," wrote Arthur J. Fettig of Battle Creek, Michigan, a railroad claims agent who had recently founded a group called the "Battle Creek Brainstormers," set to "revolutionize the railroad industry." SpeedeeMart/7 Eleven requested copies of "Principles and Procedures of Brainstorming" for prospective franchisees, and a seminary teacher wrote for a copy of Applied Imagination and a few supplementary materials, saying he was "very interested in creativity and am anxious to develop it among my students."
Attending the annual Creative Problem-Solving Institute in Buffalo was a conversion experience for many people, including Sidney Parnes, who attended the first year and returned every year for the rest of his life, first as a facilitator then as its longtime, beloved director. Research executives from General Electric, General Motors, Firestone, B.F. Goodrich, and Goodyear were among the early CPSI attendees and incorporated what they learned into their companies’ regular training programs. Enrollment reached almost five hundred by the third year. (The "Wives Club" did its own creative thinking exercises between catering duties. Women were invited to join CPSI a few years later.) Motorola CEO Robert Galvin, a CPSI attendee, personally commissioned a new printing of Osborn’s Your Creative Power and distributed it to every one of his employees. According to Osborn, by 1963 executives had ordered over a million copies of the CEF pamphlet "The Goldmine between Your Ears," an illustrated, twenty-four-page distillation of Applied Imagination. In his 1958 report on the progress of the creativity movement Osborn listed dozens of companies that had reportedly set up creative thinking programs, including Alcoa, Bristol Myers (Lee Bristol, a close Osborn friend, served as president of CEF), Carnation Milk, Chicago Tribune, Kraft, General Foods, Glenn Martin, H.J. Heinz, IBM, Hoover, Kroger, National Cash Register, Pitney-Bowes, Remington Arms, RCA, Reynolds Metals, Shell Oil, and Union Carbide.
Not all of these companies were using Osborn’s methods exclusively. The Creative Engineering program at General Motors’ AC Spark Plug division, for example, was formed in 1953 with the help of MIT professor John Arnold, who attended the first CPSI and taught brainstorming as well as his own techniques for "creative engineering." These included an exercise in which students were asked to design products for a race of aliens from the fictional planet Arcturus IV whose unusual physiology and culture would require designers to think creatively. Many such methods for stimulating new ideas coexisted together at CPSI, which quickly became the center of gravity for a "creative thinking" or "creative problem-solving" trend. But by the late 1950s Osborn’s name was practically synonymous with creative thinking. As one author wrote, "Until Osborn came on the scene, interest in the creative process was largely confined to a small group of philosophers, psychologists, and mathematicians." His "popular books on creativity have excited the imagination of a great many people," and he had "done more than any other man to draw attention to the subject of creative thinking."
Reprinted with permission from The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History by Samuel W. Franklin, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2023 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/birth-brainstorming