Brainstorming: What happens while you’re hiding

I joined a client at one of these brainstorm exercises in a Harvard Square facility run by “Ideation Facilitation Specialists”, and here’s how it worked.

Following the free wheeling brainstorming, everyone swarmed the original sheets, picked the 3 they judged to be the best out of 1100-some, went back to their places and filled out 3 new slips with the ones they selected. They all went up to the front again, and filled up a new paper sheet with well over 100 of the ideas hijacked from the original sheets.

The ideas were then combined, with “votes” for the best ones determined by how many participants selected them. Some of the ideas were only picked once or twice. A few were picked 10 or more times. The 5 ideas with the most “votes” were passed on to management back home for evaluation.

Somebody’s assistant then typed up all the raw idea sheets, which were then also reviewed back at headquarters by management and the marketing department. About 10 of the rough ideas from the original brainstorm sounded interesting enough to management and the marketing people to be added to the final list, while the brass summarily vetoed 3 of the 5 that had made it out of the brainstorm.

After additional discussion and meetings, the list of “finals” (now swelled to 12 by headquarters’ efforts) was whittled down to the 2 “best.”

The way this brainstorming project worked out was very typical to others. In this case there were 2 ideas that management deemed worthy of pursuit (1 of them plucked by the brass from the transcripts and one original “final page” survivor). After a lot of research, discussion, numerous successive internal conferences, and outlay of a shameful amount of organization time and money, nothing came of either one of them.

I asked one of the C execs what they thought of the exercise. He said, “We didn’t get anything actionable out of it, but it was good that it did get everyone thinking about our business for a couple of days.”

I kept the following thought to myself, “Shouldn’t they all be doing that anyway?”