The archive · Work & Ways of Doing · Operational decision · 1990s–2020s
IDEO's seven brainstorming rules turn idea sessions from critique into quantity
IDEO distilled brainstorming into seven rules — defer judgment, wild ideas, build with 'and', be visual, chase quantity — used in thousands of sessions.
IDEO
What it had to solve
IDEO, a design firm built on group creativity, kept seeing brainstorm sessions go nowhere: someone always explained why the latest idea wouldn't work, shifting the group from a generative to a critical mindset. The firm wanted a repeatable way to unlock the creative power of a session.
How it works
IDEO, the design firm behind products from the first Apple mouse to the Palm V, built its reputation on group creativity — and on brainstorming. Over the years the firm distilled what worked into seven simple rules, printed on a page teams review before a session begins.
The rules are deliberately behavioral: defer judgment, because you never know where a good idea will come from; encourage wild ideas, because the outrageous is often close to the brilliant; build on the ideas of others, using 'and' instead of 'but'; stay focused on the topic; have one conversation at a time; be visual, writing ideas on Post-its and putting them on the wall; and go for quantity, aiming for up to 100 ideas in a 60-minute session.
The point was to keep the room generative rather than critical. 'The only way to get to good ideas is to have lots to choose from,' IDEO.org's Design Kit explains. Across the thousands of brainstorms IDEO has run internally and with clients, the same seven rules govern the room.
IDEO.org published the rules openly as a method in its Design Kit, and IDEO U teaches them in its ideation courses — turning one firm's internal meeting discipline into a shared, teachable practice.
Why it lands
- Deferring judgment removes the fear that silences ideas, so quieter team members contribute too.
- Explicit rules like 'and, not but' force constructive building instead of reflexive criticism.
- A quantity target of 100 ideas an hour prevents premature editing and keeps the session generative.
- Making the rules visual and printed turns a soft skill into a checklist anyone can follow.
- Publishing them openly let the practice spread beyond IDEO's own walls.
What it did
The rules became the standard vocabulary of brainstorming in design: IDEO applies them across the thousands of brainstorms it runs internally and with clients, and IDEO.org's Design Kit and IDEO U's courses spread the same seven rules to teams, agencies and classrooms worldwide.
What you can take
Creativity is a discipline, not a mood: explicit rules that defer judgment and reward quantity let a team generate more ideas in one hour than free-form discussion produces in a week.
Since then
The seven rules entered the broader design-thinking canon: design toolkits, university courses and corporate workshops adopted the same list, and IDEO U still teaches them as the foundation of ideation. Later methods borrowed the spirit — Google Ventures' design sprint, which VentureBeat noted was 'originally inspired by IDEO,' kept defer-judgment techniques such as silent sketching at its core — a quiet demonstration of how one firm's meeting rules became a global practice.
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