Why cashto has a knee-jerk reaction to the word "brainstorming"
*Tap* *tap* ... is this thing on?
Several years ago, when I was a wide-eyed, straight out of college, software engineering n00b, I had my first experience with a failed development project. I was too wet behind the ears to notice it at the time (and being drafted onto the project it midway into development, I wasn't totally privvy as to why or how certain decisions got made) -- but it always seemed to have a certain desperate stench about it. It seemed a bit misconceived, and halfheartedly executed besides: management never really seemed like it was ever serious about the success of the project.
Shortly after that project's inevitable demise, I found myself in a small conference room with a half-dozen of my coworkers. Our project manager was there -- well, the dev lead really; our company didn't have program managers as a separate discipline. And he was standing in front of a whiteboard, on which was scribbled the meeting's topic: "What features should be in our next project?". It was our job to brainstorm answers to that question.
Something bothered me about that meeting, but at the time I couldn't put it into words exactly what it was. It continued to stick in my mind for weeks and months. The project unfolded in due course, and as it did I began to notice those familiar symptoms again: a general feeling of aimlessness and lacksidaisical execution. Eventually the new project failed -- as did one after it, and the one after that one too. At the point where I was beginning to see a pattern, the company was collapsing around the weight of its failures, and I was mercifully laid off.
Today I'm able to articulate exactly what bugged me about that meeting, namely: there were no customers in that room. Or outside of it, for that matter. All we had was a bunch of devs pulling dumb ideas out of their asses and trying to pretend that someday, somewhere a customer might want to have this hypothetical product with all these features, even so much as to pay real money for it. We had this illusion that we were super creative geniuses and coming up with all these new ideas, but really we were just wanking. Hell, the ideas weren't all that novel anyways.
And the insidious thing was, we came up with this heaping pile of dogshit ourselves. When we complained to the project manager, he replied ... "well, it's not my fault -- it was all your ideas". And he was right. They were our ideas. We may have never believed in them, but they were our ideas.
From that day on I've always been wary of brainstorming sessions, even going so far as refusing the participate in them. There are circumstances where brainstorming sessions are just what the doctor ordered, but brainstorming as a technique is too often misused. When the problem requires down-to-earth linear reasoning, you won't find the solution with blue-sky creative dreaming.
Fact is, most projects are not hurting for the lack of ideas. Good ideas, on the other hand, are always in short supply. The trick is in vetting the ideas -- discarding the bad ones and executing on the good ones. And in that regards brainstorming is the absolute worst thing you can do. Chances are you already know what the good ideas are, but then you go out of your way to drown them in a sea of ideas of questionable merit. You may think an idea is good because it seems to be on everybody's lips, but maybe it's just a bad idea that happens to be cheap and easy to throw out there. How will you know?
Beware of the brainstorming session -- it can create the illusion of an innovative decision making process acheived by consensus -- without providing the reality thereof.
