Alex is Dead. And It's Time To Bury Brainstorming.

Alex Osborn wanted to save creativity. And for a while, it looked like he had. An ad man in the golden age of ad men, Osborn gave the world “brainstorming” — a word that promised lightning in a bottle. Four simple rules, easy enough to scribble on a flip chart: go for quantity, defer judgment, combine, and build.

It sounded democratic. Liberating. Like anyone with a pad of paper and a few permanent markers could summon genius on command.

The Evangelist

Osborn didn’t just believe it. He sold it. He preached it to agencies and boardrooms and classrooms. He became the father of modern creativity, quoted endlessly in management books.

If you’ve ever been trapped in a fluorescent conference room chanting “no bad ideas,” you’ve heard his voice echoing through the decades.

The Ritual

And for a time, he was celebrated. Brainstorming became ritual. A corporate sacrament. The whiteboard, the marker fumes, the rainbow of sticky notes? They were all proof that progress was being made, even if nothing useful ever came out the other side.

But here’s the thing about fathers: sometimes they pass long their bad habits.

The Cracks in the Myth

Brainstorming sounded right, but it never worked the way he claimed. The studies are ruthless: groups produce fewer ideas than individuals, and the ones that do surface are rarely worth the paper they’re scribbled on.

The rules meant to unleash creativity only managed to muzzle it. Loud voices filled the air. Quieter ones checked out. Fear of looking stupid did the rest.

The Theater of Progress

And yet we carried on. We kept performing the ceremony long after the magic failed to show. We filled walls with neon sticky notes, recycled the same “out of the box” ideas, and told ourselves the pile of paper was evidence of innovation.

It wasn’t. It was theater.

Respect Where It’s Due

Still, you can’t entirely fault Osborn. In a business world that treated creativity as mystical and untouchable, he gave it structure. He gave people language. He gave them permission to at least pretend to try.

For that, he earns gratitude.

The Burden He Left Behind

But gratitude doesn’t erase the damage. What he left us was a ritual that became a crutch. Leaders clung to it because it looked like progress. Agencies sold it because it felt like collaboration. Schools taught it because it was easy to package.

And all the while, real creativity was suffocated under the weight of bad habits we were too polite to question.

Time to Bury the Myth

That’s why this is a eulogy. Not to sneer at the man, but to finally say out loud what too many have quietly known: brainstorming is dead. It was dead decades ago. We just kept propping up the body because nobody wanted to cancel the meeting.

So we bury Osborn with both respect and clarity. Respect for the spark, the optimism, the sheer audacity of trying to make creativity teachable. Clarity that the ritual he left us has long outlived its usefulness.

Alex Osborn wanted us to think more freely. Maybe the best way to honor him now is to let go of his invention.

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