The Economist May 21st 2022 Business 63enough workers amid the Omicron wave of
covid19. It stocked too many clothes and
home furnishings in order to avert a sup
ply crunch, just as appetite for these pro
ducts waned. And margins suffered as
pennypinching customers switched away
from pricier premium brands to the super
markets’ less lucrative own labels.
Neither firm is about to collapse. Tar
get’s revenues rose year on year, in nomi
nal terms at least. So did traffic in its
stores—something that is “rare to find in
retail these days”, according to Morgan
Stanley, an investment bank. Walmart’s
sales were up by 2.6%, to $142bn. Founded
by a man who prized frugality, the bigger
retailer has an established reputation for
good value—a particular virtue in shop
pers’ eyes during a recession, which can no
longer be ruled out (see Finance & eco
nomics section). Its large grocery business
offers a hedge against a downturn. And
wealthier shoppers with bigger savings
may migrate to Walmart from higherend
retailers, which could help pad margins.
The question now is who will be the
next to face a reckoning. The share prices
of smaller retailers like Kroger and DollarGeneral, which have yet to report their
firstquarter results, have been dragged
down by association. Consumergoods
giants may be the next in line. Firms like
Procter & Gamble (p&g) have been raising
the prices of their premium brands to
counter their own margin squeeze. Now
they may think twice before doing so
again, lest they lose sales. Such calcula
tions diminish their pricing power, which
markets have tended to reward handsome
ly. Investors may have taken note. OnMay
18th p&g’s share price fell by 6%, even more
than the wobbly stockmarket as a whole.nT
he word“brainstorming” conjures
up a vision of hell. It is someone
saying, “Fire up the brainwaves barbe
cue.” It is trying desperately to work out
where everyone else’s cursors have gone
on a digital whiteboard. It is hearing the
line “there are no bad ideas” and think
ing “how did this get scheduled then?”
Yet brainstorming persists, and for
decent reasons. Normal routines afford
employees precious little time to think.
Getting a group of people together is an
opportunity to harness disparate view
points. Producing, filtering and selecting
new ideas in an efficient way is an ap
pealing proposition. So why is brain
storming often so painful?
The problem is that brainstorming
must strike a balance between a series of
competing imperatives. One tension is
between creativity and feasibility. A
brainstorm is meant to be freeing, a
chance to ask outofthebox questions
(like, “Wouldn’t it be great if people had
prosthetic tails?”). But it is also meant to
produce suggestions that can actually be
translated into reality, which calls for a
more pragmatic style of thinking (like,
“What are you talking about? We work at
a salad chain.”).
Research carried out in 2017 found
that different types of ideas emerge at
different stages of a brainstorm. The
most feasible suggestions were generat
ed at the start of brainstorming sessions,
presumably because they were also more
obvious, and the most original ones
came later. Both types risk producing a
“what’s the point?” reaction from partici
pants: incrementalism is unexciting,
wild schemes are not going anywhere.
A second tension is between manag
ers and nonmanagers. By its nature
brainstorming is insiderish. Someone
has to arrange the session, and thatperson is often the manager of a team. If
decisionmakers are not in the room, then
the suspicion will grow that time is being
wasted. If they are, then hierarchies easily
assert themselves: good ideas can wither
with a frown from the boss, and bad ones
can survive with a nod.
A related issue concerns the presence
of outsiders. There is a natural temptation
to keep drawing on the same senior people
within an organisation to generate ideas:
these are the ones who get things done,
who understand a company’s strategy.
Yet reams of research suggest that
outsiders bring a fresh perspective. That
might be people from related industries:
in an experiment carried out in 2013,
carpenters, roofers and rollerbladers were
asked how to improve safety gear in all of
their fields and the most novel ideas came
from people who were not in the area in
question. But it might also be middle
managers or frontline employees who
have direct contact with customers.
A third balance to strike is between
different personalities and different styles
of thinking. A new paper from researchersat Columbia Business School and Stan
ford Graduate School of Business finds
that brainstorming on Zoom comes at a
cost to creativity: as people’s visual focus
narrows on the screen in front of them,
their cognitive range also seems to be
come more limited. But if inperson
gatherings are better, they also do not
work equally well for everyone. Some
personalities are immediately comfort
able saying what they think; others need
to be coaxed to share their opinions.
These are known problems, and there
are plenty of ideas out there to solve
them. The trouble is that lots of them feel
like they are themselves the product of a
bad brainstorming session. “Figure
storming” is a way for people to combat
groupthink by pretending to be a famous
person (“how would the queen improve
cloud computing?”). “Stepladdering”
involves people joining a brainstorm one
by one, for reasons that are not entirely
clear. Breaking the ice by throwing a
wordassociation ball at each other is a
brilliant idea, if you are throwing a birth
day party for tenyearolds.
Some simpler rules are much more
likely to help. Define the parameters of a
brainstorming session upfront. Try to
make a specific thing work better rather
than to shoot for the Moon. Involve
people you don’t know, as well as those
you do. Start by getting people to write
their ideas down in silence, so extroverts
and bosses have less chance to dominate.
And be clear about the next steps after
the session is over; the attraction of
holding a “design sprint”, a weeklong,
clearthediary way for a team to develop
and test product prototypes, is that the
thread connecting ideas to outcomes is
taut. All of which would make brain
storming a little more thoughtprovok
ing and a tad less heartsinking.Let’s pour some thought bubbles into the ideas jacuzziBartlebyMaking brainstorming better