Communication Currents

Why do the outcomes of collaborative brainstorming often fail to live up to its promise? What patterns of talk characterize successful communication in collaborative brainstorming sessions?  Participants’ in collaborative brainstorming experience uncertainties and evaluations related to the task, their identity, and their relationships. How might their handling of these uncertainties and evaluations enhance or undermine collaborative brainstorming? How might we teach participants to better manage uncertainty when collaborating in creative problem-solving tasks? We recently completed a study to answer these questions.

Collaborative brainstorming is integral to academic groups and project work teams charged with creating innovative products and ideas. Previous research has shown that such practices can yield positive outcomes such as psychological safety, consensus building, shared ownership, and successful search for solutions. However, social loafing, evaluation apprehension, and social comparison frequently limit the quantity and quality of ideas generated when people collaborate in creative problem-solving. We believe that communicative challenges also inhibit group creativity.  

Nearly all communication involves layers of meaning related to instrumental goals (e.g., what does this message accomplish in relation to our joint task?), speaker and hearer identity (e.g., what does this message say about me?), and the relationship between participants (e.g., what does this message convey about our relationship?). Interactional partners must work out the probability that they are accurately interpreting the instrumental, identity, and relational meanings of a message. They also evaluate these interpretations in terms of implications for their well-being. Thus, normal communication involves constantly weighing beliefs and desires related to instrumental aims, identity, and relationship.

Creative problem solving frustrates these meaning-making processes. Collaborative brainstorming sessions require participants to defer their complete understanding and evaluation of ideas; they must resist the inclination to reduce uncertainty through agreement about project ideas because premature consensus can undermine the quality of ideas generated by the group.  Identity and relational meanings must likewise be suspended for a time.

Our interest in how young students cope with these communication challenges led us to study how fifth graders oriented to a collaborative brainstorming task: to identify an environmental problem, then design, build, and program a robot to address that problem. We closely observed interaction in three four-member groups to identify patterns of talk that characterize more and less successful negotiation of meanings in collaborative brainstorming. In doing so, we observed that, as they initially shared design ideas, all groups managed to avoid evaluation and sustain uncertainty about task issues and avoided explicit identity and relational talk. However, the groups soon began to vary in (a) the extent to which they attended to and achieved shared understanding of each other’s design ideas, (b) attention to identity and relational meanings, and (c) the distribution of participation among members.  

The group reaching earliest consensus on a design idea did so at the expense of exploration and idea development. Their interaction was characterized by overlapping speech as members put forward their own ideas. As new speakers began to talk before the preceding speaker had finished, the new speakers attended to previous suggestions only insofar as they were similar to each newly proffered suggestion. This talk seemed to aim at reducing uncertainty about what the group should do by achieving consensus as quickly as possible and reducing relational uncertainty by alignment.

A second group failed to reach consensus in the allotted time. Their talk avoided instrumental uncertainty by rudimentary presentation, terse elaboration, and little effort to clarify design, feasibility, or the environmental benefit of ideas. They also reduced identity and relational uncertainty by explicit cues (with the compliment, “Good job,” for example).  

The group deemed most effective at meeting the communication challenges of collective creative design work generated the greatest number of design ideas and reached consensus after a moderate amount of time. The group followed a clear pattern: (1) present an idea, (2) brief discussion to clarify design, function, and benefit, and (3) present the next idea without offering explicit evaluation of the preceding idea. Thus, project ideas were explored in enough detail to achieve preliminary common understanding, while sustaining uncertainty about which idea members preferred. This communication pattern enabled the maintenance and even the generation of uncertainty needed for effective ideation; the pattern provided a relatively safe space to express and experience uncertainty related to task and to sustain uncertainty about unspoken identity and relational meanings.

The study’s implications extend beyond brainstorming in engineering design projects and fifth-grade classrooms. Collaborative design tasks are common. As suggested by earlier research, their communication challenges, particularly in at least temporarily suspending certainty about task, identity, and relational meanings, will shape the quality of ideas they generate as well as the identities, relationships, and cultures that are created. Because communication scholars have tended to emphasize the value of reducing uncertainty, our work offers an important refinement—the value of maintaining uncertainty in creative design work.

Communication educators should teach students about our strong inclination to reduce or avoid uncertainty and the importance of sustaining uncertainty in creative collaborative work. The following ideas may be useful.

• Explicitly instruct participants regarding issues (task, identity, and relationship) about which they can expect to be uncertain in collaborative creative problem-solving.
• Teach groups to recognize the value of sustaining uncertainty when brainstorming and the cost associated with the inclination to seek early agreement. Recognizing the tendency toward premature consensus as a way to escape task, identity, and relational uncertainty may embolden groups to resist the desire for certainty.
• Require each participant to present at least two project ideas for consideration by the group (to lessen identity threats evoked by the anticipation of evaluation by group members).
• Clearly differentiate between brainstorming and evaluation processes, separate them in time, and provide sufficient time for both collective ideation and idea evaluation.
• Clearly specify what students should evaluate at each phase of creative problem-solving. Students many not be aware of all dimensions on which ideas can be judged, and they may have difficulties negotiating the communicative complexities of evaluation and synthesizing group judgments.