Why I Stopped Running Brainstorms (And What To Do Instead)

The Sticky Note Trap

We have all been there. The energetic facilitator. The smell of Sharpies. The wall of neon post-it notes. It is the classic brainstorm or Design Thinking workshop. And for years, I loved it. The energy is infectious. It feels like work. It feels like you are solving the problem right there in the room.

But if you look closely at what comes out of those sessions, you start to see a pattern. The ideas are… fine. Good even. They are logical. They are expected. They are what happens when a group of people try to be brilliant on command between 2:00 and 4:00 on a Tuesday.

They’re also B- ideas at best. They aren’t bad. They just aren’t special.

The AI Parallel

Now, I’m seeing the same pattern with AI. If you open ChatGPT and say, "Give me 10 ideas to solve X," you’ll get these same types of ideas. They will be competent, plausible, and completely uninspired.

Why? Because both the tired employee and the LLM are doing the same thing: they are reaching for the most likely, most accessible answer to get the task done.

In a world where creating average ideas is now free and instant, "good enough" is a death sentence. If you want to find the breakthrough, the idea that actually differentiates you, then you need a better structure.

Finding The Answers At MIT

Like a lot of folks in this field, our teams stopped running traditional brainstorms ages ago, searching for something that actually worked better.

The seeds for this approach were planted when I got an amazing chance to dive into Systems Architecture at MIT. We learned how to dismantle any “system”, from a pencil or a sailboat right up to a huge company or a space program into its core components and, crucially, the intent of each part. We called it ToByUsing. It's a clunky name, but trust me, it is the single most reliable way I’ve found to cut through ambiguity to discover divergent, unexpected solutions. It’s a total mental shift that will literally give your brain a workout, but it’s worth the pain to get there. Let’s look at the three layers, quickly.

First, everything exists for a purpose, a desired result, totally separate from how it achieves it. This is the guiding “why.” It’s your “to” statement. If you were inventing the sailboat, this would be: “to travel over water.”

Next, everything has a strategy, the unique method it uses to tackle the problem. The “how” it achieves the goal. This is the “by” statement. Now, combine the “by” with the “to” for our sailboat, and you get: “to travel over water by windpower.”

Finally, everything has a unique solution, the specific thing that leverages the strategy to hit the goal. The “what.” This is the “using” in ToByUsing. Now your full idea is: “to travel over water by windpower using a sail and hull” (You’ve now reached the limit of my sailing knowledge.)

Architecting Better ideas

Okay, so we’ve broken down something familiar. But how does this spark creativity? Here’s the fun part: we flip the model on its head. Now, you’re not breaking down, you’re building up.

We start with that desired outcome. Let’s say you’re stuck with a brutal commute. You love the job and the team, but the drive is just burning you out and moving or working from home isn’t an option. So, what’s the move?

Start with your desired outcome: To improve the experience of a long commute.

That’s your goal. It has to be true, no matter what specific solutions you end up finding. Take the time to get this right as everything flows from here.

In a classic brainstorm, you’d probably jump right to the obvious fixes: listen to music, catch up on podcasts, maybe call a few friends.

But with ToByUsing, your next step is to generate every possible strategy for meeting the goal, not the specific solutions themselves. Your strategies might include:

• By time reduction (reducing the duration of the commute)
• By reframing (changing your perspective on the purpose of the commute)
• By productivity (maximizing the usefulness of the commute time)
• By entertainment (maximizing the joy of the commute time)
• By exploration (shifting the commute from a direct route to an exploratory one)

This is just a starter list, and I’m sure you could find more. The goal here is to really push into every dimension. Shoot for 8–12 solid strategies.

Finally, we land on specific solutions, which are the unique ideas that leverage those strategies (the By’s) to meet the outcome (the To).

For that first "By" (time reduction), a couple of ways to do it might be “using time-shifting,” like commuting before or after rush hour. It could also include speeding in the breakdown lane, but that comes with….other consequences. The point right now isn't to filter out the impractical stuff. It's to map the whole solution space.

For the second "By," you might uncover many ways to psychologically reframe your commute time, like using a shift from “time wasted in traffic” to “time to reflect” on where to focus your energy, how the day went, and so on.

Just like in the step before, you need to force yourself to identify 8–12 “Using” statements for every single “By.” This takes work. You’re getting into depth. Your head might start to hurt again but remember, you’re not just “coming up with ideas”; you are literally mapping the entire solution space. It’s not easy to master on your own. We've been using this method for years, and I can tell you it’s as much art as it is science, but the reward for mastering it is massive.

I’ve put together a quick 4-minute explainer video that shows how this looks when applied to the challenge of reinventing a better corkscrew. Check it out here.

Silence is a Feature

But the structure is only half the battle. The other half is time.

The traditional live brainstorm is built for extroverts. It rewards loud voices and people who are comfortable “in the room”. But the truly profound stuff, the big ideas that reset expectations and unlock new meaning, almost never come from a noisy room under a two-hour deadline.

They happen in the dark. They happen late at night, on a long walk, or in the early morning quiet over coffee. When there’s space. When there's time to think.

Creativity doesn’t happen on a schedule.

Putting It Into Action

Here’s the move: Run that initial session with your team, introduce the ToByUsing structure, and get the ball rolling. But then, hit the pause button. Give your team permission to walk away and continue to build the ideas independently. Give them days, even a week or two, to fill out the map. Get them to hunt down new "By" strategies, expand on them with unique "Using" solutions, and quietly refine their thinking. Give them time for that deep focus, armed with the structure of ToByUsing to build out the entire solution space. Create a persistent digital whiteboard for this (I’m partial to Miro, but others work) where everyone can contribute and build upon each other asynchronously. Run more sessions if you want as well.

When you combine a rigorous structure with asynchronous time, something awesome happens. The introverts finally get their chance to shine. The slow thinkers go deep. You stop getting just "groupthink" and start harvesting a genuine diversity of perspective. You’ve unlocked the full, quiet creative power of your team.

You end up with a portfolio of ideas that is far more robust, thoughtful, and unexpected than anything you could have generated in an afternoon.

The goal here isn't to find "the one good idea" right away. Success is measured by fullness. You’re trying to exhaustively map out the full landscape of solutions. It gives you a playing field where every team member from every discipline can relate and contribute.

It’s inclusive, it’s repeatable, and it actually works whether you’re in the same room or working across time zones. It takes the pressure off "being a creative genius" and turns it into a collaborative architecture project, which is honestly both fun and satisfying as you discover new areas on the map.

So next time you have a big problem to solve, resist the urge to buy another pack of neon post-it notes. Build the map. Give your people the space to fill it in. And see if you don't end up with something a whole lot more interesting than B- ideas. Next time, we’ll talk about what to do with your giant map of ideas once you have them, and why traditional voting is the worst way to choose a winner.