Creative people love to brainstorm, but it’s important to know when to stop and start doing the hard work. When I get around to writing the IRLXD book, this is going to be one of the top ten things that keep great work from happening.
Among the consequences: when brainstorming happens it can take over an entire meeting until there is no time left to decide which ideas will be executed, much less how they will be executed.
And often since the participants are in an expanding mindset they are very reluctant and even sometimes obstinate to have to kill or choose darlings. When no ideas are thrown out, you end up with a kitchen sink solution which is usually messy and incoherent to the outsider since it arrives without the context of the joy of the meeting. But that’s assuming that the kitchen sink solution ever gets made, because the kitchen sink is almost by definition, a whole lot of work.
Even meetings that are not intended to be brainstorming meetings often become overrun with inappropriate ideation. Meetings are boring and hard, ideating is fun and easy. I like ideating as much (probably more) than the next person. But when people are getting excited about new ideas and laughing and enjoying the free flow of ideas I look like a real killjoy when I propose we start killing darlings and assigning tasks that are far less fun than ideating.
It’s been said that ideas are cheap. But I’ve seen that without action they can be costly.