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white collar criminal.
    Of all the people I have found on the floor, passed out in the back of a bus, this guy is the best.
    My overall impression is that he is not as good as I make him out to be. Get me out of jail so that I can go to Chicago instead of him.
Buford T. Morton, Inmate #335342
Walla Walla Federal Penitentiary
Walla Walla, Washington
    Once John arrived for the interview, everyone in the office was peeking out of his or her doors, hoping to get a look at the fellow who submitted the wild application. He was polite and poised during his interview, and was admitted.
     

    The concept that there are no bad ideas is a hallmark of good brainstorming. During a brainstorming session it is important to explicitly state that there are no bad ideas. You need to break with the assumption that ideas need to be feasible in order to be valuable. By encouraging people to come up with wild ideas you diffuse the tendency to edit your ideas before you share them. Sometimes the craziest ideas, which seem impractical when they are initially proposed, turn out to be the most interesting in the long run. They might not work in their first iteration, but with a bit of massaging, they might turn out to be brilliant solutions that are feasible to implement.
    Running a successful brainstorming session actually takes a lot of skill and practice. The key is to set the ground rules at the beginning and to reinforce them. Tom Kelley, general manager of the design firm IDEO and David Kelley’s brother, wrote a book called The Art of Innovation, in which he describes the rules of brainstorming at their firm. One of the most important rules is to expand upon the ideas of others. With this approach, at the end of a good brainstorming session, multiple people feel that they created or contributed to the best ideas to come out of the session. And, since everyone in the room had a chance to participate and witnessed the emergence and evolution of all the ideas, there is usually shared support for the ideas that go forward toward implementation.
    If you have participated in brainstorming sessions, you know that they don’t always work like that. It is hard to eliminate the natural tendency for each person to feel personal ownership for their ideas, and it can be tough to get participants to build on others’ suggestions. Patricia Ryan Madson, who wrote Improv Wisdom, designed a great warm-up exercise that brings to life these two ideas: there are no bad ideas and build on others’ ideas. You break a group into pairs. One person tries to plan a party and makes suggestions to the other person. The other person has to say no to every idea and must give a reason why it won’t work. For example, the first person might say, “Let’s plan a party for Saturday night,” and the second person would say, “No, I have to wash my hair.” This goes on for a few minutes, as the first person continues to get more and more frustrated trying to come up with any idea the second person will accept. Once this runs its course, the roles switch and the second person takes on the job of planning a party. The first person has to say yes to everything and must build on the idea. For example, “Let’s have a party on Saturday night.” The response might be, “Yes, and I’ll bring a cake.” This goes on for a while and the ideas can get wilder. In some cases the parties end up under water or on another planet, and involve all sorts of exotic food and entertainment. The energy in the room increases, spirits are high, and a huge number of ideas are generated.
    This is the type of energy that should be present during a great brainstorming session. Of course, at some point you have to decide what is feasible, but that shouldn’t happen during the “idea generation” phase. Brainstorming is about breaking out of conventional approaches to solving a problem. You should feel free to flip ideas upside down, to turn them inside out, and to cut loose from the chains of