苏州木渎影视城招聘:风暴再临！头脑风暴的最佳方法与技巧

作者：Art Markman

翻译：西来意

　　以小组讨论的形式来激发创意的活动可应用于很多情形。我们通常把这种活动形式称作“头脑风暴般的讨论会”。而“头脑风暴”一词，实际上起源于亚历克斯.奥斯本(Alex Osborn)在1939年创造的一种只遵循简单而合理的直觉规则，将所有想法在不经过任何评价的情况下一一列出的技术方法。

The problem with group brainstorming sessions is that the technique is often ineffective. That is, groups that get together to generate ideas often generate fewer ideas than the individual group members would generate if they worked alone. A number of scientific studies have backed up this productivity loss from brainstorming.

　　头脑风暴小组遇到的一个普遍问题，就是这种技术经常失效。也就是说，小组成员聚集在一起所激发出的想法，经常少于他们独自工作时所产生的想法。许多科学研究都证实了这种在头脑风暴过程中“创造性丢失”现象的存在。

Because of the observation that brainstorming often backfires, researchers have explored ways to improve brainstorming techniques. For example, research that I did with my colleagues Julie Linsey and Kris Wood explored methods that involve having people generate ideas individually before getting together as a group. That helps to increase the number and quality of ideas people generate.

　　由于发现头脑风暴技术常帮倒忙，研究人员已经开始在探寻改进头脑风暴技术。就像我和我的同事，朱丽叶.林斯（Julie Linsey）和克瑞斯.伍德（Kris Wood）也做过一些类似的研究。我们提出了一些方法，其中包括在头脑风暴活动开始前，先让各个组员独自激发创意的技术。这些技术有效的增加了人们激发创意的数量，同时也提高了创意的质量。

An interesting study by Jonali Baruah and Paul Paulus published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011 examined the influence of the aspect of the problem people think about on the performance of the group.

约纳利.巴鲁克（JonaliBaruah）和保罗.保卢斯(Paul Paulus)在2011年的《实验社会心理学期刊》上发表了一篇有趣的研究。他们验证了人们在团队内部的思维表现将会受到各个方面的影响。

Many difficult problems that require brainstorming to solve are multifaceted. For example, if college students wanted to make suggestions about ways to improve their college campus, they could focus on academics, faculty, athletics, activities or dorm life.

　　许多需要用到头脑风暴技术的疑难问题往往涉及多个层面。举例来说，如果要让大学生们提出如何让他们的校园变的更完美的建议，他们的建议往往会涉及学校的专业水平、科系设置、体育运动、集体活动或是宿舍生活等等各个方面。

Baruah and Paulus had groups of three college students generate ideas to improve their campus. For some groups, each student was asked to focus on a different element of the campus. For other groups, each group member was given all three topics and was asked to generate ideas about each one.

　　约纳利和保罗将大学生们每三人分成一个小组，要求他们提出改善校园的建议。对某些小组，不同的学生被要求集中思考改善校园的不同方面。而相对于其他小组，所有组员都被告知他们应当关注的所有三个话题，他们需要对每个话题进行思考。

The researchers also varied the relationship among the topics. Some facets of a problem are similar. For example, the academics of a school and the faculty are similar. In contrast, academics and dorm life are more dissimilar. Some groups were given suggestions for three related topics, while the other groups were given suggestions for three unrelated topics. All of these groups were compared to a control group that got no instructions except to generate ideas to improve the campus.

　　这两个研究人员还给不同的小组分配具有不同关联度的话题。某些问题所涉及的内容很相似。比如，学校的专业水平和教员质量很近似。相反的，专业水平与宿舍生活的关联度就很差。有些小组获得的三个话题是相关的，而另外一些小组则获得了完全不相关的三个话题。所有这些小组都将会与一个控制组相比较，这个控制组在得到需要提出改善校园的建议这个任务之后，没有获得过任何引导。

In this study, the best combination of instructions was for each group member to receive all three topics as a focus and for those topics to be as dissimilar as possible. This combination of instructions led to the largest number of ideas, and the greatest variety of ideas. This set of instructions also led to ideas that were generally more original than those that the group with no instructions were able to generate.

　　这项研究表明，最好的引导模式组合是让每位组员都能接收到所有三个话题作为关注点，并且话题的相关度越小越好。这种引导模式组合将激发出数量最多的，最丰富多样的创意。它所激发出的创意，也通常比没有接受过任何引导的小组所能提出的，更加新颖，更贴近问题核心。

What do these results mean, practically speaking?

When you generate ideas in a group, it is often possible to bring together people with different types of expertise. In group settings, each person will use the perspective defined by their area of expertise to guide them in generating ideas. The present results suggest that having people who come from different perspectives can be useful, but it is most useful if each group member first identifies their area of expertise and encourages other people to envision the problem from their perspective as well. In that way, the group gets the benefit of having many different points of view, but also the benefit of having many people thinking about the problem from this diversity of perspectives.

　　当你想在团队里获得创意的时候，最可能的做法就是将有着不同经验的人聚集到一起。在这样的小组里，每个组员都将能够运用他们各自领域里的特有观点来激发创意。现有的研究结果告诉我们，拥有不同专业领域的人非常有用，但最有用的是，事先让组员根据自己领域的专业经验识别出问题，然后再鼓励其他人从各自专业的角度进行思考。这样的话，小组就会得益于拥有许多不同的视角，更得益于能让更多人从不同的角度考虑问题。