Usually no one.

When six of you show up for the brainstorm in the nicely appointed conference room and the leader is poised to take copius notes with the smelly dry-erase marker at the clean, empty whiteboard, the ideas run dry.

I’ve also found the same to be true if you erase the dry conference room and replace it with smelly bean bags - same scenario, just more snooze inducing.

The fact that these types of brainstorms often end with the fearless leader scheduling another brainstorm is not breaking news, and The New Yorker has a great article explaining why good ideas come to us when they do (The Eureka Hunt by Jonah Lehrer and, unfortunately, only the abstract is available online).

It is a fascinating article that discusses how and why the brain creates those “eureka” moments that pull together seemingly unrelated information to create new ideas and novel connections.

In a world where we sell ideas and not products, understanding the process can be invaluable.  It is something ad agency Modernista seems to have figured out, given the glowing write-up in Monday’s USA Today (agency co-founder Gary Koepke: “This business is no longer about just creating things. It’s about conceptualizing ideas — kind of like a think tank.”)

If your business is selling ideas, how do you make the creation of those ideas systematic and repeatable?  I’m not sure you can without creating the scenario of the conference room whiteboard.  But I do think we can be more efficient, and it begins with understanding how ideas come to you in the first place.