The marker squeaked, a high-pitched protest against the relentless optimism that coated the conference room like a layer of industrial polish. Two dozen Post-it notes, vibrant squares of potential, clung to the glossy whiteboard surface like brightly colored moths drawn to a pre-set flame. Ideas-some brilliant, some half-baked, some outright absurd-were meticulously transferred, one by one, from minds to paper. An hour of ‘no bad ideas,’ a decree issued with the best of intentions, echoed hollowly in the room’s forced cheer. After what felt like 62 minutes of this ritual, it happened, as it always did. Old Mr. Henderson, the senior manager, pushed back from the table, a slight smile playing on his lips. He strode to the board, a monarch surveying his kingdom of fleeting thoughts. His hand, deliberate and assured, moved to circle not one, but two of his own suggestions. “Excellent session, everyone,” he announced, his voice booming with a manufactured satisfaction that felt 2-dimensional. “Let’s move forward with these.”

The Performance of Collaboration

That’s the exact moment, isn’t it? The precise tick on the clock when the life drains out of the room, when all those genuinely offered sparks of creativity die a quiet, dignified death. We call it brainstorming, but for years, I’ve watched it unfold as something else entirely. It’s not a method for generating ideas. It’s a performance. A carefully choreographed display of collaboration designed not to innovate, but to reinforce an existing hierarchy, to make the person at the top feel like an enlightened leader whose brilliant ideas somehow miraculously emerge from the collective unconscious. Or, more accurately, from his own subconscious, validated by the nodding heads around the table. It’s a subtle theatrical production, staged 2 times a month, perhaps, for the benefit of 12 or 22 attendees.

I’ve been in maybe a hundred and forty-two of these things over my career. I even ran a few, early on, convinced I was fostering a truly free flow of creativity. I’d set up the room just so, ensure there were plenty of snacks, tell everyone to feel free to share anything, no matter how wild. I truly believed I was facilitating something real, something democratic. But the outcome? Always the same, like clockwork striking 2. The loudest voice, or the most powerful voice, would inevitably steer the ship. And if that voice was mine, well, wasn’t that just a delightful coincidence that the best ideas came from the person leading the charge? It took me a long, embarrassing number of these sessions, maybe 22 of them back-to-back, to understand the pattern, to see my own unwitting complicity in a system that promised liberation but delivered conformity. I used to chastise myself for not being “creative enough” in these meetings, when in reality, the structure itself was designed for a different purpose entirely.

The Training of Conformity

It teaches us all a lesson, a subtle, insidious kind of training. It teaches us that our contributions are merely props, background scenery in someone else’s play. It punishes vulnerability, because offering a truly wild or unconventional idea means risking a raised eyebrow, a polite but dismissive cough. And it rewards conformity, because echoing the sentiments of the person who holds the purse strings is always the safest bet. That initial rush of excitement, the genuine desire to contribute something meaningful, evaporates, replaced by a quiet cynicism, a sense of resignation that can last for 2 days or 2 weeks. We learn to self-censor, to offer only ideas that are ‘safe’ or that we suspect will align with the pre-determined agenda. We become spectators in our own creative process. We even start to match our ideas, like I match my socks after laundry, to fit the established pairs, never daring to introduce a rogue pattern.

Think about Wyatt B.-L., the union negotiator. He had a way of reading a room, of seeing the unspoken power dynamics at play. He once told me, after a particularly grueling negotiation that lasted 2 days, that the first demand on the table is rarely the real demand. It’s a testing ground, a performance, designed to gauge reaction and establish a baseline. The true objective lies beneath, revealed only through careful observation and a refusal to take things at face value. He’d talk about the “theatre of negotiation,” how much of it was about posture and perceived strength, not actual substance. Brainstorming, in many companies, is exactly like that first demand. It looks like collaboration, but it’s often a sophisticated way to get buy-in for a pre-existing notion. Wyatt understood that much of corporate life is about managing appearances, about creating an illusion of collective agency. He knew how to dig past the surface, past the Post-it notes and the forced smiles, to find the real intention, to uncover the 2 or 3 genuine sticking points amidst a dozen superficial ones.

The Illusion of Collective Genius

This isn’t to say genuine collaboration is impossible. Far from it. But true collaboration requires a different kind of structure, a different kind of leadership. It needs a leader humble enough to truly listen, to truly step back and allow ideas to flourish organically. It demands psychological safety, where ideas aren’t judged by their source but by their merit, where someone can suggest something radical without fear of being labeled ‘unrealistic’ or ‘too disruptive’. It means sometimes leaving a session without a clear “winner,” allowing ideas to marinate, to be refined, to be combined in ways no single person could have envisioned in 62 minutes of forced ideation. It’s about trusting the process, not just the individual.

My most vivid memories of actual creative breakthroughs never happened in a whiteboard-filled room. They happened in quiet conversations, over bad coffee, during late-night walks, or while staring blankly at a wall, wrestling with a problem solo. The moment of ‘aha!’ isn’t usually a communal thunderclap; it’s a solitary lightning strike that then needs a collective effort to harness and refine. We’ve become so obsessed with the *idea* of group genius that we’ve forgotten the power of individual insight, and the nuanced process of refining it. It’s like trying to design a custom shower experience by having a dozen people shout out random features for 42 minutes. You end up with a chaotic mess, a Frankenstein of desires, rather than a cohesive, beautiful system. When you’re seeking excellence, like the finely crafted wet room screens from Elegant Showers, you need a curated collection, an expert choice that provides better results than a chaotic, unstructured free-for-all. It’s about selecting, refining, and presenting the best, not just presenting *everything* and hoping something sticks. A truly collaborative process, much like a well-designed bathroom, involves selecting the best components, not just piling everything in.

The Erosion of Trust

I remember one time I was so convinced my team needed to brainstorm a solution for a particularly thorny client problem. We spent over 92 minutes, generating what I thought were truly promising ideas, building on each other’s thoughts, or so I believed. I left feeling invigorated, certain we’d cracked it. I even presented “our” solution to the client with enthusiastic pride. The client, a perceptive woman who had run 2 successful companies, listened patiently, then asked, “And which parts of this were actually *your* initial thoughts, before the meeting?” I stammered, caught off guard by her directness. She wasn’t accusing me, she was just noticing the familiar contours of my own thinking woven deeply into the “collective” output. That moment was a pinprick, deflating my self-congratulatory bubble. It was a clear demonstration that even *I*, in my efforts to be a good leader and foster collaboration, had inadvertently co-opted the group’s energy to validate my own leanings. That’s a mistake I’ve tried hard to learn from. It’s one thing to lead, another to manipulate the appearance of consensus for 2 quick wins.

The underlying frustration here is a deep one: the erosion of trust. When people realize their input is merely theatrical, a gesture performed for the benefit of the hierarchy, they withdraw. They stop investing their true creative energy, their unique perspectives. And why should they? They’re told “no bad ideas,” but the unspoken truth, learned over 2 or 3 such sessions, is “no bad ideas… as long as they align with the boss’s vision.” It creates a subtle, almost imperceptible distance between intention and action, between what’s said and what’s done. And in that gap, where the real self meets the required performance, creativity withers. People begin to dread these sessions, viewing them as interruptions to their actual work, another box to tick, rather than genuine opportunities.

Redefining Collaboration

So, what do we do about it? Do we abolish all “brainstorming” sessions? Maybe. Or maybe we redefine them. Instead of a free-for-all, perhaps we use structured idea generation, where individuals develop concepts *before* a group discussion. Perhaps the leader’s role isn’t to generate ideas, but to pose the critical, incisive questions, to challenge assumptions, to facilitate a rigorous and impartial selection process. It’s about being an editor, not just an author. It’s about building a robust framework for ideas to be judged on their merit, not their origin or the volume of the voice that articulated them. We need frameworks that celebrate thoughtful consideration, quiet development, and then, yes, a robust and equitable discussion. Otherwise, we’re just gathering to watch good ideas go to die, a predictable tragedy playing out on a whiteboard, day after 2nd day.

The ghosts of those unchosen ideas linger in the air, a silent testament to wasted potential, haunting the empty coffee cups and stray Post-it notes. And perhaps the most tragic thing of all, is that we keep showing up, hoping this time will be different, hoping the game will change, only to find the same old script playing out for the 22nd time.