The value of brainstorming

Doesn’t it feel like for every good idea there are many similar bad ones? To illustrate what I mean, here is a text from  “Good in a Room” by Stephanie Palmer:

A year after Legally Blonde was released, a writing team came into my office and pitched me, quite literally, another version of Legally Blonde. Te ideas were the same, beat for beat and character for character, save that instead of going to law school, she went to medical school. It was called Blonde, M.D., I believe. I asked them if they knew that MGM had made Legally Blonde. They did not. I asked them if they knew that I was one of the executives who supervised the movie. They did not. I asked them if they had anything else to pitch. They did. They had a version in which she becomes a spy, title James Blonde.

Although we might think the writers copied the idea of Legally Blonde, there is a bigger chance that they were living in a cave. Sometimes we are delusional and we think we go a “grand idea” out thin air, when is basically something we saw before and we just decided on changing the wrapping (and then forgot where the idea came from). This is not intentional, we are just egocentric beings, which leads to a bad ideation process: developing the first idea we think is brilliant.

By having only one idea, even if we think is original or creative, we  focus on it resulting in our choice, without contemplating if it is really a good. In contrast, brainstorming leads to having many good ideas and bad ones. Since we have to make a choice we need to think and we end up with a short choice paralysis. As a result we have to evaluate which ideas are worth more resources and which not. In other words:

Quantity -> Choice Paralysis -> Thinking -> Quality

My grand mother once told me:

When making a decision, always check with people above you and bellow you

What my grand mother was trying to explain was the value of a individuals perspective on the same matter. Everybody has different experiences that define how they perceive reality. What might be obvious to you is not to others and vice versa.

Brainstorming is not a garantee of us producing great ideas, not even good ones, however we decrease the possibilities of ending executing on a bad one. That is why we always need to test, just by checking with others will be enough. If at the end it was really a bad one, at least we learnt something, not mentioning that we have a pool of more ideas we can prototype and test. If not we will end up with two dumb blondes.

Note: Design thinking is a process that can helps us find those great ideas.