gabrielmoreira Brainstorming Skill
Asked to brainstorm, a model produces ten reasonable ideas that any competent person would list — which is retrieval, not ideation. Real brainstorming has two phases with a wall between them: diverge (volume, no judgment, deliberately weird) then converge (explicit criteria, honest scoring). This skill enforces the wall.
What This Skill Produces
- A divergent set: 20-40 ideas spanning distinct strategies, not ten variants of one idea
- A convergent shortlist: 3-5 selected against criteria named before scoring
- The reject ledger: what was set aside and why — half the value, always preserved
Required Inputs
Ask for (if not already provided):
- The problem or prompt, and what an idea must accomplish to count
- Constraints that are real (budget/tech/brand) vs assumed — challenge one assumed constraint deliberately
- What's been tried or rejected already (avoids retreading; also reveals the requester's hidden criteria)
Divergent Phase (no judgment permitted)
- Quota past the obvious. The first 8-10 ideas are what anyone would say — produce them fast to exhaust them, then keep going; ideas 15-30 are where non-obvious lives.
- Rotate strategies, don't rephrase. Generate down distinct axes, a few ideas per axis:
- Inversion — what would make the problem worse? Reverse each answer
- Extremes — the $0 version; the $10M version; the version shipping tomorrow
- Transplant — how does a hospital / game studio / street market solve the equivalent?
- Constraint removal — if [assumed constraint] vanished, what becomes possible?
- Actor shift — the user solves it themselves / the community solves it / it never occurs at all (prevention)
- Combination — force-merge two earlier ideas
- Keep the weird tail. 20% of the set should make the requester slightly uncomfortable. A brainstorm with no bad ideas didn't explore the edges — the weird ones exist to stretch the space, and occasionally to win.
- No evaluative language in this phase. Not even "(probably impractical)". Judgment leaks kill volume.
Convergent Phase (judgment, but named)
- Write criteria before looking back at the list. 3-4 max, from the requester's actual situation (impact, feasibility-this-quarter, differentiation, reversibility…). Criteria chosen after re-reading the list get reverse-engineered to bless a favourite.
- Score coarsely (✅/➖/❌ per criterion). False precision on creative options is theatre.
- Shortlist 3-5 with one line each on why. Include one wildcard — highest-variance, criteria-marginal — labelled as such.
- Preserve the rejects with reasons. "Rejected: needs a partnership we don't have (yet)" is a future idea with a trigger condition; a deleted reject is a repeated brainstorm next quarter.
Output Format
Brainstorm: [prompt]
Divergent set ([n] ideas, by strategy): [grouped list — no judgments attached]
Criteria (named before selection): 1) … 2) … 3) …
| Shortlisted | [C1] | [C2] | [C3] | Why it made it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (3-5 rows, incl. 🃏 one wildcard) |
Reject ledger: [idea → the criterion it failed → what would revive it]
Quality Checks
- ≥20 ideas spanning ≥5 distinct strategies — not variants of two ideas
- The weird tail exists (ideas that risk sounding silly)
- Zero evaluative language in the divergent set
- Criteria were stated before scoring, and trace to the requester's situation
- Rejects preserved with revival conditions
Anti-Patterns
- Do not judge while generating — one "(unrealistic)" mid-list collapses the whole divergent phase
- Do not produce ten polished-obvious ideas and stop — that's a search result, not a brainstorm
- Do not let the criteria appear after the list has been read — that's rationalising a favourite
- Do not delete the rejects — the ledger is half the artifact
- Do not ship the shortlist without the wildcard — a fully-safe shortlist means the exercise removed everything it was for