Brainstorming has had a huge influence on modern work.
Many teams still assume that if you put smart people in a room, ask them to suspend judgement and generate lots of ideas, the best solutions will emerge.
But the research on classic spoken brainstorming has long been less flattering than its reputation. People often generate more ideas, and sometimes more original ones, when they think on their own first and then combine their ideas later. One reason is ‘production blocking’ – in a live discussion, only one person can speak at a time, so other thoughts get delayed, diluted or lost.
Why this matters in Scrum
Scrum teams are often invited to brainstorm together.
This can happen in refinement, Sprint Planning, product discovery workshops, retrospectives, or ad hoc problem-solving sessions. The assumption is often that collaboration and idea generation are the same thing.
They are not.
A team can be highly collaborative and still use a poor method for generating ideas.
Open verbal brainstorming can favour the fastest talkers, the most confident voices and the people who are quickest to react in public. It can also make the team feel productive without necessarily helping it think better.
The problem is not collaboration
The answer is not for Scrum teams to stop thinking together.
The better lesson is that teams often get stronger results when they do not begin by talking all at once.
Start with individual thinking.
Then bring ideas together.
Then discuss, combine and refine.
That preserves the value of collaboration without paying the full cost of group ideation.
A better pattern: 1-2-4-All
This is where Liberating Structures can help.
Their 1-2-4-All practice is explicitly presented as an alternative to brainstorming. It begins with one person reflecting alone, then moves into pairs, then fours, then the whole group. It is designed to generate and sift many ideas quickly while involving everyone.
That sequence matters.
It gives quieter people room to think before stronger voices fill the space. It reduces pressure to perform instantly. It lets the group gather more raw material before moving into convergence.
In other words, it respects both solitude and collaboration.
What Scrum teams can do instead
Rather than asking, “Who has ideas?”, try a more structured sequence:
- ask everyone to think silently on their own first
- capture ideas individually in writing
- share them in pairs
- combine and improve them in small groups
- bring the strongest ideas back to the whole team
That is still collaborative. It is just better designed.
Interestingly, the picture changes a little online. Research on electronic brainstorming suggests that teams can perform better when people contribute in parallel rather than taking turns aloud. In that sense, remote idea generation can sometimes combine collaboration with enough separation to help people think more clearly.
Think together, but not all at once
Scrum values collaboration.
But collaboration does not always mean thinking out loud in the same room at the same time.
Sometimes the best way for a team to think together is to begin apart.
That is not a retreat from teamwork.
It is a more thoughtful way to use it.
Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash
