Metastrategic Brainstorming

Every team brainstorms: gather ideas, defer judgment, fill the board. Few teams ever brainstorm about the brainstorming — and that omission explains why most sessions produce the same ideas in the same order from the same people.

The metastrategic move is to choose the how before the what. Who speaks first — and does the loudest always anchor the room? Do ideas arrive simultaneously or in rounds? Are we widening or narrowing today? Each of these choices silently designs the output before a single idea is voiced.

The principle reaches beyond meetings: every creative process has a strategy, explicit or inherited. The writer who never questions her method is being edited by it. The default is not neutral; it is just unexamined.

So once in a while, hold the meeting before the meeting: how should we think about this? What are we assuming about how to proceed? The hour spent designing the thinking is repaid by every hour of the thinking itself. Strategy about strategy is the one upgrade that improves all the others.