Rules of Thinking, The

RULE 68

Think up a storm

Brainstorming is a very specific way of thinking as a group. Generally you brainstorm at the beginning of a project or when there’s a collective problem that needs solving. It’s very much an early part of the ideas process and involves a group of people throwing out as many ideas as possible. The idea is not to arrive at the answer, but to create options for working towards it. So it’s just stage one in the project.

In some ways it’s seen as the classic style of group thinking. It was first formulated as a technique back in the 1930s by Alex F. Osborn, although one imagines people must have been doing something similar for millennia before he refined the process. Osborn had become frustrated by how few ideas his staff ...