A popular myth is that the meaning of Brainstorming is somehow related to generating a storm of ideas in a brain. While this makes sense, the creator had something slightly different in mind when he came up with the term: The word Brainstorming was coined by Alex Faickney Osborn (1888-1966) in his book Your Creative Power, published in 1948. Osborn was a very successful advertising executive and business owner during his time.
This is how Osborn explains how the name “Brainstorming” came about:
“It was in 1939 when I first organized such group-thinking in our company. The early participants dubbed our efforts ‘Brainstorm Sessions,’ and quite aptly so because, in this case, ‘brainstorm’ means using the brain to storm a creative problem and do so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.”
What is brainstorming then?
Following Osborn’s definition, consider a problem a fortress we try to storm with a group of brains (our army):
Classical brainstorming is a group technique to create new ideas. The group takes a specific problem and creates as many ideas as possible in a limited time.