Beware the permanent brainstorm

There is a particular type of person out there who is very creative, who loves to come up with new ideas, who gets excited about a new concept they think could be really successful or beneficial. These people are vital -- without them, many (if not all) of the big ideas that have changed our lives would never have happened.

But there is one flaw that often comes hand-in-hand with this level of creativity and brainstorming. For every Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), there is that friend you have who is convinced that adding zipper pockets to suspenders is the next big thing. Or maybe that was last week, and now they're pitching tiny umbrellas for cellphones. In any case, their mind seems to always be working, but never carrying through the thoughts to something that is not only a great idea, but one that they can (and do) actually implement. I call this the danger of the "permanent brainstorm."

Those examples are extreme, but I believe there can be a real danger to focusing so much on the brainstorming and "ideating" portion of a project that you never get off the ground and develop something real.

For a more grounded example, consider a project where a company wants to come up with a new marketing website. All they know at first is that they want to target a new audience that they don't currently speak to. The brainstorming phase begins, and the team narrows it down to one particular concept.

This could go two ways -- the team could further focus in, delineate their ideas, and develop them into a site and get it live.

Or they could just keep brainstorming. What if we broaden it to include this other audience as well? What if we focus more on the interactive games? What if we switch from an edgy/rough look to a clean/modern look? And then after trying all those alternatives, they keep spinning around to other ideas. A hot new competitor site shows up halfway through the project, and they want to take some of the competitor's ideas and re-think the original goal.

You get the picture. The ideas keep coming, the project keeps changing, people second-guess their original ideas and the whole thing continues to mutate and shift even as it's supposed to be nearing its completion. The budget has swelled, the timeline has been shot, and corners are being cut that could make the difference between something great and simple and something overly ambitious and complicated.

Of course, this is not to say that brainstorming is bad - as I mentioned before, it's the brainstormers who come up with all the big new ideas. The key is knowing when to shift away from generating more ideas and shift toward refining and implementing your original idea. It can be scary sometimes to do this, but it's all about putting a stake in the ground and saying "this phase is done, we need to move on to the next phase, or else we're going to get stuck."

That can be a hard thing to do. Nobody likes the idea of setting something in stone when they are anything less than 100% sure of it -- and rarely is any new idea a 100% bet. But this is where handy metaphors and sayings run short -- unless you are engraving tombstones, you're not literally setting things in stone. You can make changes later on if need be -- it's just important to respect that those changes should be based on fully reasoned thinking, not whims, or a dream you had last night, or what your 5 year old said when he saw a mock-up of the project.

Be excited. Think wildly. But recognize that as part of any project, brainstorming is just step one. It takes a lot of work to turn a good idea into a good product, and you'll never get to a successful end if you never leave step one.