On the small delay that makes a brainstorm actually storm
One day, I was invited to join a brainstorm. I opened the Zoom link they had sent. The team looked well composed for a brainstorm — six or seven people, a good spread of ages, backgrounds, and where they were living. Everyone was friendly. Everyone seemed to enjoy thinking up new things.
And the brainstorm failed.
Probably because no whiteboard tool was open.
What the room felt like
The failure was not loud. Nobody argued. Nobody looked confused. The meeting became a sequence: one person’s idea, then another’s, then the next person’s. Each idea arrived complete — a concept, a rationale, an inspiration, a concrete example — all packed into one breath. We nodded. We said “interesting.” We moved to the next person. When the meeting ended, no one had picked up anyone else’s idea. Nothing had been sharpened. If there had been minutes, they would have read like a list of self-introductions at a party.
If you have been in enough brainstorms, you know the other feeling too — the one where…