>As a creative leader I also required each person involved in the brainstorm to do individual work beforehand. This is overlooked. There's an inherent assumpti

>As a creative leader I also required each person involved in the brainstorm to do individual work beforehand. This is overlooked. There's an inherent assumption with brainstorming that you start from nothing and form ideas. The issue is that you need some context around what you're generating ideas for to shape them. It also helps to have time to shape these ideas before sharing them, even at the "first stage." This allows everyone time to form some early ideas and shape them in a way they can easily express them so others understand the vision and can iterate, mutate, etc. around a solid understanding around the shape of the context. You don't need weeks but at least an evening to casually/informally think over things is typically enough. If you dont do this, you get some initial thoughts with a lack of any data and everyone asking lots of questions around context instead of forming ideas around the context. Essentially, you spend time finding the cursory data you need to have a proper brainstorming session. Then you get ideas that had no time to form. People can typically generate ideas and iterate out sets of bad ideas themselves. The remaining potentially good ideas are the ones perfect for a brainstorming session. From my experience, this is where valuable group brainstorming starts and takes on a life of its own.