Written By Cari Borden

We’ve all been told that brainstorming is the magic ticket to innovation: gather a team, fill a whiteboard with wild ideas, and suddenly you’ve unlocked creativity at scale.

And to be fair, when it’s done right, brainstorming really does work.

• Diverse perspectives spark fresh angles you’d never find in a silo.
• Encouraging innovation makes people feel bold enough to toss out the unconventional.
• Building team cohesion and buy-in transforms ideas into shared ownership, not just top-down directives.

In theory, it’s beautiful. In practice? Too often it looks more like corporate theater than collaboration.

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The Four Principles of Brainstorming (and How They Get Twisted in Toxic Organizations)

1. Quantity over Quality
   • What it should mean: The goal is to generate a lot of ideas, wild, half-baked, even outrageous. Volume creates the raw material for brilliance.
   • In toxic reality: Leadership tolerates a flood of “ideas” but secretly dismisses them all. The only one that counts is the one they already had before the meeting.
2. Withholding Criticism
   • What it should mean: Ideas need room to land before they’re dissected. Judgment pauses until everything’s on the table.
   • In toxic reality: Criticism is withheld publicly but sharpened privately. Days later, your “unrefined” suggestion shows up in someone else’s deck—with zero credit to you.
3. Welcoming Unusual Ideas
   • What it should mean: Give space for the unconventional. The off-beat ideas often lead to real breakthroughs.
   • In toxic reality: Anything “too unusual” gets the side-eye and the classic: “Let’s stick to what’s realistic.” Translation: keep coloring inside the corporate lines.
4. Combine and Improve Ideas
   • What it should mean: Take pieces of different suggestions and fuse them into something stronger together.
   • In toxic reality: Leaders cherry-pick the safest fragments, mash them into a Frankenstein project, and then blame the team when it flops.

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Spotting Performative Brainstorming

If your “brainstorm” feels like:

• A PowerPoint deck preloaded with the “winning” idea,
• Leaders asking for input but only nodding at their favorites,
• Meetings where psychological safety is just a buzzword,

…then you’re not brainstorming. You’re role-playing innovation while the real decisions happen elsewhere.

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How to Turn It Around

• Set the rules. Make it clear upfront that all ideas are welcome, and define how feedback will happen.
• Create visible equity. Rotate facilitators, invite quieter voices, and give credit in real time.
• Follow through. Nothing kills creativity faster than disappearing ideas. Track, act, and share the outcomes.
• Model the behavior. Leaders, your job isn’t to have the answer. It’s to protect the space where the real answer can surface.

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✅ Call to Action:
If your brainstorming sessions feel more like stage plays than innovation labs, it’s time to flip the script. Build trust. Protect the weird ideas. And for leaders who truly want change, don’t just run the meeting, run interference against the toxicity that silences voices.

Because great ideas don’t die from lack of creativity. They die from lack of courage.