The most underrated skill in any creative business
Companies and agencies, what happened to brainstorming?
Every great script and campaign I’ve ever worked on has one thing in common. Talented people who were given actual time to think and play around with ideas. To say the half-formed thing without someone immediately dismissing it. To let the idea breathe before anyone tried to kill it.
The projects I’m proudest of didn’t come from a prompt. They came from a long process.
Today most companies have stopped valuing the process of brainstorming.
The pattern in the industry
The brief comes in, the timeline is tight, and within the first 48 hours someone has already run it through an AI tool and presented three directions.
Nobody pushed back. Nobody asked the weird question, and nobody said “what if we didn’t do the obvious thing?”
And if you bring up the idea of actually sitting with the brief for a while to give the team space to think before producing, you’re met with “we have AI tools now, we don’t need to spend time on that”.
But in practice, it means managing four different AI tools simultaneously. It means receiving outputs that are technically coherent and completely off-brand, then rewriting them from scratch while pretending you’re just “refining.” It means adjusting, correcting, and cleaning up AI slop on a deadline that was set assuming the AI would do the heavy lifting, which it didn’t.
More output, tools, revisions, and less time to actually think.
The cruel irony is that chasing speed has created more work, not less. The work that survives is rarely the work anyone is proud of.
This whole “AI culture” has confused volume with value.
What actually works
Alex Osborn, the advertising executive who coined “brainstorming” in 1953, had the right four principles from the start:
1. Defer judgment
2. Welcome wild ideas
3. Go for quantity
4. Build on each other’s ideas
The fix is surprisingly simple: start alone, not together.
Have everyone generate ideas silently and in writing before anyone speaks. This one change, called brainwriting, has been shown to produce 37% more ideas than verbal group sessions. It removes production blocking entirely. It gives every voice equal weight, including the quiet ones.
Then bring the group together to build, combine, and pressure-test what’s already on the table.
What this looks like in practice
Some of the most useful techniques I’ve encountered:
Freewriting: Set a timer for 10–15 minutes. Write without stopping, without editing. No filtering and no judging. This one is deceptively simple, and the magic is in not stopping.
SCAMPER: A checklist that forces you to look at an idea from seven angles: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse. Great for when you have something to start from and need to push it somewhere new.
Reverse brainstorming: Instead of asking “how do we solve this?”, ask “how could we make this problem as bad as possible?” Sounds counterintuitive. But when a team is stuck, it frees up thinking in surprising ways and brings in people who don’t consider themselves “creative.”
Looping: Freewrite for five minutes. When the timer goes off, circle the single most interesting sentence or image. Write that at the top of a new page and go again. A great way to drill down to the actual heart of an idea.
The question burst: Spend four minutes generating only questions about the challenge. No answers allowed. Better questions yield better solutions than jumping straight to answers.
Why it gets cut
The honest answer is time. Brainstorming done well takes time and requires sitting with uncertainty. It means resisting the urge to close down options too quickly.
In a culture that rewards speed, that’s a hard sell.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. The campaigns that everyone remembers (the scripts that actually move people) didn’t come from the first obvious idea. They came from what happened after the team pushed past that first idea, several times. After the quiet person in the corner said the thing that sounded too weird, but made most sense. After someone reversed the brief and asked what would happen if they did the opposite.
You can’t automate your way to that.
What I’d tell any creative lead right now
Protect the kind of brainstorming where everyone writes before they speak. Where you push past the obvious into the uncomfortable. Where a half-formed idea gets a chance to become something real.
The best projects I’ve ever worked on had that built in. Some took hours, and others took years.
Allow your creative team time to create, and they will give you back more than you could ever ask for.
Sources:
Brainstorming Exercises That Actually Work — The Meaning Movement
How to Brainstorm Ideas: A Step-by-Step Guide — Storyflow
Unearthing the Right Idea — One Wild Word