> the variation of first having everyone brainstorm alone, then combining and grouping the outcomes

This. A thousand times this.

I find the biggest common issue with brainstorming is that you end up with an incoherent amalgamation of things that people think are individually important. People have a hard time evaluating options unless they are part of a coherent whole. Brainstorming beforehand, alone, allows them to figure out what's important and then imagine a coherent story around that thought. Otherwise you end up with solutions that technically contain individual important details but make no coherent sense as a whole. It's like saying "well, Suzie like dragons and Jimmy like potatoes so we put them together in a story." If Suzie had brainstormed before she could propose a backstory and context that the group finds more compelling than Jimmy's context about potatoes and they could have a more fruitful discussion than "I don't like potatoes," or "Dragons are dangerous."

Edit: Now that I think about it, this might be at the core of what the article describes as the optimum collaborative environment for innovating - people who exist separately and have their own coherent problems and solutions to worry about such that when combined they lead to even more innovative solutions for problems they didn't initially realize had any overlap.

> the variation of first having everyone brainstorm alone

This would be called "thinking" by most people wouldn't it?

Calling it a variation rather than the complete opposite approach seems like people just like the word brainstorming.

Your conclusion is if you decide to call whatever works "brainstorming" then brainstorming works. If you study the specific technique that has been called brainstorming for decades it doesn't work. Like the title says.

Your normal mode of thinking involves quickly dismissing many ideas, thoughts, hypothesis, etc., which is necessary to actually get stuff done. Brainstorming isn't a good idea when you're trying to think of a way to cross a road quickly.

Brainstorming let's you freely associate by postponing your own judgement. It gets you into corners of your mind you wouldn't visit if you were actively trying to solve the problem. Of course that is also a way of 'thinking': the point is that you get into a different mindset and think in different ways.

Fair enough, is it common to describe this task as brainstorming when it's done solo?

I only really hear it used when it's a done as a group activity.

As far as I know that is common, but I would also still describe it as a group activity, even though the initial idea generation is done solo. The process could for instance be:

* Do a short exercise to prime everyone to 'let go of their default mindset' (you can leave this out if everyone is experienced in doing this, although it should usually be fun)

* Have everyone put their own ideas to paper, within a reasonable amount of time, while together in the same room, but without communicating about them

* Together, group the results: determine overlaps and outliers.

* Then discuss the results together

In the last phase, the first exercise and the resulting mindset still has some effect: people will be less protective of their specific ideas, because of the mindset that generated them, which can easily be blamed for 'silly' ideas. Some outliers can therefore be dismissed easily. On the other hand, people will more seriously consider ideas they might otherwise have dismissed as 'silly' right after they were uttered. Some outliers may prove to be very valuable and a group brainstorm wouldn't have resulted in them.

Brainstorming, as I understand the term, is used to describe this entire process of idea generation and evaluation. Not just the phase/mindset when generating ideas and not just when that happens in a group together. Perhaps this school of thought is more regionally limited than I know and this is indeed not generally known as 'brainstorming'.