- One of Alex Osborn's original tenets
as he outlined the idea of brainstorming in his 1948 book,
"Your Creative Power,"
was to eliminate idea criticism from the session.
It seems impractical at first,
not every idea is viable.
So why not hyper-focus on only the ideas
that solve the problems in their entirety?
Because in doing so,
you're leaving potential ideas unsaid,
ideas that in the hands of another stormer
could be molded into something great.
It's natural to want to judge the ideas as they're shared,
it may even seem efficient.
This is the convergent thinking exercise
that is necessary to get down to the idea
that you'll go forward with,
but doing so comes at the cost
of the divergent thinking exercise
of developing many possible solutions.
And this part of the process
is simply too valuable to stagnate.
Keeping the convergent exercise
that focuses on narrowing the field
separate from the divergent exercise where we're ideating
accomplishes two things.
One, it supports the foundational goal of brainstorming,
which is to produce possibilities rather than solutions.
And two, it encourages the generation and sharing
of out of the ordinary ideas.
The concept that there are no bad ideas
has been a part of brainstorming lexicon for decades.
And few would argue that judging ideas as they're offered
is a fruitful practice.
But few recognize that idea judges
aren't limited to external sources.
There's an internal judge
that is doing just as much damage
to the success of the brainstorm
as an external one.
And each participant has one.
There's a little voice inside everyone's head
that is telling them not to share that seed of an idea.
That idea is terrible, it says,
or worse, they'll think you're stupid.
So those ideas,
starters and incomplete thoughts never get shared.
For every idea that's offered to the group,
there are dozens of ideas
that each stormer keeps to themselves
out of fear of judgment.
So don't just remove external judgment from the room,
encourage the quieting of the internal judge
by communicating that the session is designed
for possibilities and fragments of possibilities
so offer everything.
You'll leave the process of sorting through the aftermath
to another time.