Why “Brainstorming” Is Dead (and how to replace it)

Traditional brainstorming simply doesn’t work.

Decades of research—from the 1950s through the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond—consistently show that traditional brainstorming sessions underperform.

The culprits are specific psychological traps: self-censorship triggered by fear of judgment, “production blocking” as people wait their turn to speak, and anchoring on the first few ideas while bolder thinking gets suppressed.

So how do you get teams to innovate and solve problems creatively?

Having helped hundreds of senior leaders build a culture of innovation, my business partner Kaiser Yang and I have developed modernized techniques that have proven to generate more, better ideas in the organizations that have put them into practice.

(Side note: these exercises and others like them are available in our brand new Find A Way Field Guide, which you can download for free by clicking this link).

Let’s get into the tools. 

Role-Storming

You’ve probably heard time and again about the value of a “fresh perspective.”

What if you deliberately, immediately, adopted several new perspectives in one ideation session?

In a Role-Storming session, everyone generates ideas as if they were a different person entirely.

By stepping into someone else’s shoes, you bypass the fear of judgment that causes self-censorship. The ideas aren’t “yours”—they belong to the character—which creates psychological safety for bolder thinking.

To facilitate a Role-Storming session, simply have everyone pick a person. It can be Steve Jobs, Dumbledore, Miss Piggy, Galileo, your biggest competitor, Marilyn Monroe, a six-year-old child, Edison, Beyoncé, or anyone’s ideas you’d like to channel.

Then, have everyone write down ten ideas as their character (note: some research shows sessions work better when individuals generate ideas on their own first, then come together to share).

Share the ideas. Try to “yes, and” as much as possible. Have fun.

At worst, you’ll generate a ton of fresh, slightly weird ideas you wouldn’t have thought of before. 

At best, you’ll make real progress toward solving your particular problem.
 

The Bad Idea Brainstorm

Step 1: Challenge your team to generate the worst possible ideas—approaches most likely to fail spectacularly, offend customers, or waste resources.

By deliberately seeking terrible ideas, you remove all pressure to be “right.”

Prompts to try: What’s the worst way to solve this problem? What would be the most unethical approach? What’s the most useless service we could offer? What would guarantee we lose every customer? What’s an idea our moms would hate?

Step 2: Review the ideas with an eye for flipping bad into good. Hidden within those awful ideas may be seeds of breakthrough thinking. Explore them deeply, looking for ways to modify terrible into terrific.  You’ll end up discovering approaches you never would have found through conventional methods.

The World’s First

Frame your challenge as a quest for something truly groundbreaking. In this technique, the only acceptable ideas must begin with “the world’s first.”

Struggling with employee retention? The world’s first company that gives departing employees a “boomerang bonus” if they return within a year.

Dealing with long customer support wait times? The world’s first help desk that calls you back and pays you $5 for every minute you waited.

Want more honest customer feedback? The world’s first product review program where negative reviews earn double the loyalty points.

These ideas are meant to be far out—even implausible. Like the Bad Idea Brainstorm, the goal is to clear the psychological barriers that block bold thinking.

And buried within those “impossible” ideas, you’ll often discover a practical gem that would never have surfaced through conventional methods.

20 Questions

This technique is a complete reversal of traditional brainstorming. Instead of pressuring your team to produce answers, you ask them to generate questions.

What assumptions are we making that might be wrong? What would our competitors least expect us to do? What do our customers secretly wish we’d change? What would we try if we knew we couldn’t fail? What’s the opposite of what everyone else in our industry is doing?

By shifting from answers to questions, you move your team into exploration mode—and often surface blind spots and opportunities that never would have emerged from a traditional “shout out ideas” session.

For a deeper dive into these and dozens of other proven innovation techniques, download our free resource: The Find A Way Field Guide.

Your best ideas are waiting.