Applied Creativity and Concept Generation - Brainstorming

Thomas Edison put it plainly: "To have a great idea, have a lot of them." Steve Jobs said something similar. "Creativity is just having enough dots to connect... to connect experiences and to synthesise new things." Both of them are saying the same thing. Your first idea is rarely your best one. The reason why people you call creative can come up with great ideas easily is that they have had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people. So the question becomes: how do you get more ideas, faster? The Most Used Method for Applied Creativity The answer has a name. It was coined by advertising executive Alex Osborn in the 1940s. He called it brainstorming - using the brain to storm a creative problem, with each person in the room attacking the same objective. It sounds simple. Most teams think they already do it. Most of them are wrong. Real brainstorming is a structured process with rules. Break the rules, and you get something that looks like brainstorming but produces far fewer useful ideas. Why Most Brainstorming Sessions Fail Here is what kills a brainstorming session before it even starts. Someone says an idea. Someone else says, "That won't work." The room goes quiet. People stop sharing. That is it. That is the whole problem. When people fear judgment, they self-censor. They only say the safe, obvious ideas. The interesting ones, the ones that could actually lead somewhere, stay locked inside people's heads. Most teams have that one gaffer who has already decided which ideas are worth hearing before anyone has finished their sentence. Or the one who gives you the floor, listens patiently, and then quietly bins everything you said, not because it was bad, but because it was not theirs. Both types do the same damage. The room reads it. People stop sharing. And just like that, the best idea in the session never gets spoken. The goal of brainstorming is to get more ideas. That means the number one rule is: defer judgment . The Rule