Bill Burnett on brainstorming like a designer

(gentle music) - A lot of times when I say, "Hey, I'm going to teach you brainstorming," everybody goes, "Oh, I know how to do that. "I've been doing that for years and years and years." Although a lot of what I see people doing doesn't look like brainstorming to me. Everybody kind of knows the rules of brainstorming. You get four or five people together. You can't, by the way, you can't brainstorm with 20 people. Everybody has to be able to see each other. I think of brainstorming like a jazz ensemble. Maybe you can have a trio, a quartet, a quintet, maybe, but past that, you can't play jazz. It's just too complicated, too many people. So they get together and they often come up with a question and they brainstorm for a while and they go, "Great, that was fantastic," and then there's all these post-its or all these notes on a whiteboard, and somebody says, "I'll take a picture," and they take a picture with their cell phone. And then, and that's, in my mind, is that's where ideas go…