Hugh Haskell said, "I have been in brainstorming sessions where no one was
allowed to criticize any of the ideas proposed, no matter how ridiculous..."
Thanks Hugh, I thought maybe this was a northwest Ohio phenomenon. You have
confirmed it is wider spread. All the "brainstorming sessions" I've been to
in the last several years have come with these explicit instructions. I
think all the administrators must have gone to the same workshop or read the
same management magazine.
I like the word triage as Hugh used it. The real trick in brainstorming or
"thinking outside the box" is being able to apply triage without stifling
creative thinking. I have always felt this was one of my strong
attributes... being able to think outside the box, yet able to quickly
determine which ideas have sufficient merit to pursue further. Without some
degree of triage or critical thinking, brainstorming sessions are a huge
waste of time, and that is how I would view almost all brainstorming
sessions I have participated in for several years.
Am I really supposed to give serious consideration to a particular proposal
for half an hour or more when I know right from the start that the proposal
cannot possibly work? Am I really supposed to keep my mouth shut when the
proposal is to use 5 kilograms of something I know costs a dollar a
milligram, and our budget is 25 thousand dollars? Even if we could get the
cost down by a factor of one hundred we still couldn't afford it.
In the barometer legend the overall lesson might be allowing people to think
outside the box, but notice all the given examples are examples that will
work; and they all work within constraints of physics, money, time. The
triage has already been applied.
Michael Edmiston
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton College, Bluffton, Ohio 45817