Document the Process, Not a Conclusion
A brainstorming session's value is in the process traced, not a fixed conclusion delivered. Document the journey (thought graph, timeline, sources) so it can be resumed, revisited, and mined — and respect incubation by making pauses a first-class feature.
- Wallas's incubation stage (1926) is validated empirically: Sio & Ormerod's meta-analysis (2009, 117 studies) found incubation significantly improves insight problem-solving; strategic pauses are a legitimate creative technique, not a weakness
- Built-in source provenance is the field's biggest gap (surveyed in agentic-tools research): almost no brainstorming tool records where ideas came from; provenance enables future sessions to re-evaluate ideas on new evidence
- A "parked" branch is not a failed idea — it is a resumable thread; the thought graph preserves what was not chosen as richly as what was, enabling later mining
- Shneiderman's CST principle "Leverage rich history" (2002, 2007, CACM): tools should preserve all past work so users can return; showing only current state destroys the journey's accumulated value
- The facilitator's closing move is always to document where the session was heading, so the next session can pick up from the right place without losing orientation