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I hate brainstorming. It was created by advertising executive Alex Osborne as a technique for developing advertising ideas. Among the rules established by Osborne was the “suspension” of judgment or criticism of ideas. However, without judgment ideas are frivolous at best. While this may work in the advertising world, it’s not of much use in any other part of the organization. We need to be skeptical. We need to understand the weaknesses of our ideas because that’s the only way that we can develop them. The creative process is an evolutionary process and judgment is the mechanism we use to drive the progression.

An idea – in and of itself – is worthless. The value in an idea only lies in its implementation, in doing something with it, in bringing it into the world. Most organizations are full of good ideas although few are full of great ideas. The great ideas are the ones that you can implement, that evolve with implementation as part of the criteria we use to pass judgment on it.

A Fortune 500 executive recently told me that they have plenty of great ideas … they just don’t know how to implement them. Well, I had to disagree with him because a great idea has its implementation built into it. Great ideas are ones where the implementation is obvious (not always easy, but always apparent). At some point in the evolution of your idea you need to build the implementation into the idea itself. The fifth chapter of my book explains how.

The creative process begins with the problem. Identifying it. Understanding it. And then defining it and re-defining it. When I’m working on a concept development team we spend a lot of time on the problem.  The first chapter of my book is devoted to understanding problems and how to define them. For example, In the 1920’s Henry Ford defined his  problem as “building the least expensive car.” And he did and was very successful. But William Durant over at General Motors defined the problem a little differently, he said “let’s build a car that people can afford.”  This led to a huge innovation … the formation of GMAC and the financing of automobiles. GM was able to make much more interesting cars and make them affordable through monthly payments.

I when I hear executives tell me that “we’ve got a lot of great ideas, but we just don’t know how to implement them” it’s like the sound of set of finger nails being dragged across an old school chalkboard. You see, a great idea is one that’s constructed with its implementation as part of its DNA. In other words, the implementation of a great idea is obvious (not necessarily easy) because the thinker considers implementation as she constructs the idea. If the implementation isn’t obvious, and it usually isn’t, then that just means that you’ve got more work to do on the idea. You’ve got to re-structure it so that it can be implemented.

If you don’t know how to implement the idea, you haven’t completed the thinking process.

Skepticism is instrumental to the creative process. Creative people are skeptics. It takes a cynical mind to drive the process. Without one, you simply accept the way things are and have no internal need for creating, which means a need for doing things differently.

Most companies have either a formal or an informal brainstorming process, often mediated by an outside source. However, the great misconceptions that result from brainstorming are more detrimental to the creative process than anything that results from the process itself. The constraints of brainstorming leave out many important aspects of the creative thinking process. In particular, most brainstorming moderators tell you to suspend judgment, and most of us erroneously take this to mean that criticism and judgment are detrimental to the creative process. They are not, they are instrumental to the process. Without them your ideas are trivial and frivolous.