Where Good Ideas Go to Die: The Brainstorming Fallacy
The popular incarnation of group brainstorming isn’t where good ideas are born; it’s where they often go to die a slow, unremarkable death.
A stale scent of lukewarm coffee hung heavy in the air, a physical manifestation of the mental fog that had settled over the group. Six people, perhaps more like 16 if you counted the lingering echoes of past failures, were locked in a staring contest with a whiteboard. It wasn’t the whiteboard’s fault, of course, nor the vibrant, aggressively optimistic sticky notes plastered across its surface – 66 of them, if memory served. No, the culprit was the silence, broken only by the rhythmic squeak of a marker in our manager’s hand as she circled one particular note. ‘Great!’ she chirped, her voice cutting through the tension like a dull knife. ‘Let’s get some momentum on that.’ The idea was… safe. Predictable. It wouldn’t rock any boats, but it certainly wouldn’t launch any either. In the corner, I saw Emerson W.J., our supply chain analyst, subtly shift his weight. I knew, with the certainty of someone who’d seen this play out 26 times before, that Emerson had something genuinely disruptive bubbling beneath his calm exterior. Something that wouldn’t see the light of day.
It’s a performance, really.
A stage for the loudest voices, the most confident pronouncements, the ones least afraid of the uncomfortable silence that follows a truly wild idea. The rest of us, the ones
