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Comment by perpetualcrayon | Hacker News Reader

"the more general the ideas you're talking about, the less you should worry about repeating yourself"

A rule-of-thumb I've generally followed when brainstorming is "never write down the ideas". And if at all possible, try to forget them, good or bad. It inevitably forces me to re-think the ideas "from scratch". I've never been worried that an idea would escape me or that I would forget it, as I think the exercise of re-thinking ideas from scratch has helped me build a relatively solid mental model of the world. I feel that, with practice, this method of brainstorming has started bringing me to the solid / useful (general / surprising) ideas faster.

It has likely, over the years, added weeks or possibly months worth of time that I've spent brainstorming the same (general) ideas over and over.

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As an aside, I can't say for sure how you use the term "brainstorming" here, but there is plenty of evidence that classic-style brainstorming in groups leads to less ideas, and less creative ideas.

When I was forced by my boss to teach designers brainstorming, against my better judgement, I instead made this slideshow summarising my frustrations and what I would suggest people do instead:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB...

The ideas in this presentation are great. Thanks for posting

Agreed, really stimulating and well put. Thanks for sharing.

Indeed, great presentation, thanks for sharing :)

Thanks, glad to hear I'm not the only one tired of sitting in unproductive brainstorming sessions for the wrong reasons.

Not that think that what I suggest is perfect either, but it seems to be a bit better aligned with how ideation works.

Hope it will be of use to you all! :)

Nice presentation. Something I've seen a lot over the decades is internal politics. One huge advantage of not using a brainstorming team is 99.999999% of humanity is more creative by sole mass of brain power than the team will be (Six billion people vs a team of ten people) so almost all good ideas, for any problem, will be discovered outside the team.

If the team is in charge as a group of doing the brainstorming, 99.999999% of the good ideas will come from non-team individuals who will be automatically shot down as "not your job" "work on your own team" and similar primate dominance games. If you brainstorm individually, that 99.999999% of good ideas has a better change of getting implemented. Groups hate outsiders (and by extension, their ideas), without a boundary there is no group.

Another internal politics problem is reward. Teams exist to funnel all success upward and channel all failure downward. Everyone knows if they actually have a solution its wasted on the team unless they're the leader. There are financial and career pressures for teams to fail so individuals can keep the fruits of their labor, so to speak. This can lead to very low team performance.

Thanks, although I personally feel it's more like a decent article disguised as a bad powerpoint (text overload) - works better when sharing it afterwards though.

I've been told it's better live when I combine it with barely-contained frustration - turns out to be a very relatable experience for many.

I have been lucky enough to never have been in an organisation with a dedicated brainstorming team, but your description definitely sounds like how it would play out in reality. Thanks for sharing, now I know it's a red flag.

If you combine that with brainstorming being misused for identifying problems (instead of solutions to known problems) like I mention early on, things probably get even worse.

> (instead of finding potential solutions to known problems)

I loved this! You should post it as a submission here, not just a comment.

I could do that. What's the etiquette for this?

"Show HN: [Title]" with an explanation in the comments?

That sounds good to me. I don't know a lot about the etiquette other than as long as the original title is intact and non-clickbaity it is fine.

Done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15241373

I find group sessions generally aren't very productive also. I am strictly talking about brainstorming I do independently.

I figured - the way you described your process wouldn't fit the systematic brainstorming style :)

Anyway, I think get what you're saying with not writing things down: you're forcing yourself to start from the ground up, so the result matches the problem better. Having said that, I wonder if this isn't more dependent on how you note things down and organise your thoughts, because like others have mentioned here, I would have lost a lot of ideas if not for short scribbles.

You may like this quote from John Steinbeck's 'East of Eden':

> Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”

Brilliant quote, thanks for sharing.

I usually write down everything and then go back through and determine what's worthwhile. There's almost always gold that I never would have remembered had I not written it down.

There is a risk here that one might trick themselves into believing they've made good progress in developing an idea, when if they had attempted to write it down in some detail, the fuzziness of our internal thought processes would be revealed and the perceived rigor of the idea would be revealed as somewhat illusory.

I've found this phenomenon to reveal itself even more explicitly when attempting to explain some of my more complex thoughts in detail to others.

I think the benefit you are aiming for can be achieved by making an effort to revisit prior ideas with fresh perspectives and from different angles, and then later comparing and contrasting the different attempts.

I've found notes from years ago describing the thing I was thinking just a few months ago..

Makes me feel I should write them down, and revisit/expand on them properly..

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