Any board member, staff, or volunteers of an organization who has had to endure an organizational brainstorming session may find it rewarding to read or hear via podcast "The Problem with Brainstorming," by Wired columnist iMomus (who in other guises is also Nick Currie and trickster-pop-music artist Momus). In it, iMomus recounts the history of this ubiquitous problem-solving genre (it came out of WWII and the advertising industry of the 1950s).
He recounts his own experience at a recent brainstorming session, very accuately capturing (for me) the general ambience of these sessions and their frequent banality of results.
It is still used to a very great extent in nonprofit organizations. I suspect that one of the reasons for its continuing popularity is that it allows participation by all in the organization and it is not very costly to execute.
What iMomus offers as an alternative is the use of masks and avatars—expressing creativity by acting as someone else would. The technique is employed to a very great extent throughout the Internet, whether in chat rooms, email discussions or blogs.
As discussions continue about the successor organization to the recently defunct Association for Volunteer Administration, it might be well to pursue a different model than the freewheeling whiteboards and self-stick easel pads and instead ask the question, "what would Momus do?"
