Whose Ideas Count?

Fixing brainstorming, Part 3: On power, status, and the brainstorm as audition.

Photo by Zac Gribble on Unsplash

---

I am delighted to publish this first co-authored piece with Dr Sven Brodmerkel.

Sven Brodmerkel is an academic and a practitioner. He spent years as a communication strategist in the advertising industry before joining Bond University, in Queensland, Australia, as an Assistant Professor in Advertising. He writes Off-Script at Work from lived experience, shining a light on what it’s like to have a neurodivergent mind in the modern workplace.

We found each other through Substack, realised we were circling the same territory from opposite directions, and wrote something together. It’s about what happens in brainstorming before a single idea gets spoken: who gets heard, who gets credited, and what it actually takes to fix that.

Although published on both our Substacks, Sven must take most of the credit for this piece, the third in a series he has written on this subject. I can’t recommend his work highly enough.

---

Let me describe a meeting you may recognise.

The team is brainstorming. Someone quiet — let’s say they’re neurodivergent, though they haven’t disclosed this, because why would they — offers a suggestion. It lands in the room like a stone in a pond. A small ripple. Nothing. The conversation moves on.

Fifteen minutes later, the most senior person in the room says something similar. Not identical — looser, less developed, missing the detail that made the original idea actually workable. The room responds immediately. Someone says “that’s brilliant”. Someone else starts building on it. By the end of the meeting, it has become the direction.

The person who said it first says nothing. They have been here before.

We fixed the format. We haven’t fixed the room.

In part 1 of this series I argued that classic brainstorming suppresses ideas — that the format itself disadvantages introverted, anxious, and neurodivergent participants before a single idea has been voiced. In part 2 I made some suggestions for how to fix the format. Async pre-work, written contribution, structured turn-taking: these are genuine improvements, and they matter.

But format is only part of the problem. The other part is power. And power doesn’t care about your new brainstorming protocol.

Even in well-designed ideation sessions, three failure modes persist — quietly, consistently, and with real consequences for the people they affect most.

Failure mode one: Status dominance

In most brainstorms, airtime is not distributed equally. It is distributed according to seniority, confidence, volume, and what organisational psychologists call “status cues” — the subtle signals that tell a room who is worth listening to before anyone has said anything substantive.

Neurodivergent professionals are frequently on the wrong side of this calculus. Not because their ideas are weaker, but because the signals that confer status in a brainstorm — fluency, speed, eye contact, the ability to think out loud without visible effort — are precisely the signals that cost some neurotypes the most to produce.

The result is a room that sounds inclusive but functions as an audition. The criteria being assessed are not creativity or analytical rigour. They are charisma, cultural fit, and the particular kind of confidence that performs well under social pressure. Many brainstorms are, in this sense, less about generating ideas than about identifying who leadership material looks like.

Spoiler: it tends to look like whoever is already in charge.

Failure mode two: Interpretive control

Even when neurodivergent professionals do contribute, there is a second filter: who decides what “good” sounds like.

Ideas don’t arrive in brainstorms pre-evaluated. They get evaluated in real time, by the room, according to criteria that are rarely made explicit and almost never examined. And those criteria — what counts as creative, what counts as practical, what counts as “a bit out there” versus “genuinely innovative” — are not neutral. They reflect the cognitive and communicative preferences of whoever holds interpretive authority in the room.

This is where accent, communication style, directness, and neurodivergent traits intersect in ways that compound rather than merely add. The person who is already coded as “a bit intense” or “hard to read” or “not quite a culture fit” is also the person whose ideas are most likely to be received with a slight pause, a gentle redirect, or the particular death sentence of corporate creativity: “let’s park that one.”

“Let’s park that one” is almost never about the idea.

Failure mode three: Credit drift

The scenario that opened this essay is not unusual. It has a name in the research literature — “idea ownership ambiguity” — though most neurodivergent professionals who have experienced it would use less academic language.

The mechanism is straightforward. A quiet contribution gets insufficient acknowledgment in the moment. A more socially fluent or higher-status participant reframes it — sometimes deliberately, more often without even noticing — and receives the credit. The original contributor, already uncertain about whether they belong in the room, recalibrates downward. They contribute less next time. They are assessed, eventually, as not particularly creative or engaged.

This is not just hurt feelings. It is a feedback loop with career consequences. Credit shapes visibility. Visibility shapes promotion decisions. Promotion decisions shape who gets to be in the room next time.

Credit drift is, in this sense, not a minor interpersonal friction. It is a talent pipeline problem wearing the mask of a brainstorming format.

Power-aware brainstorming

“Inclusive brainstorming” — async pre-work, multiple modalities, structured turns — addresses the format. It is necessary. It is not sufficient.

What organisations actually need, if they want the full range of cognitive diversity in the room to count, is something more demanding: power-aware brainstorming. Which means, concretely:

Rotating facilitation, so that interpretive authority doesn’t default to seniority. Named attribution, so that ideas are credited to the person who offered them and that credit travels with the idea as it develops. Explicit turn structures that don’t reward volume or speed. And — most uncomfortably — a willingness to examine who tends to get the airtime, whose ideas tend to survive the convergent phase, and whether that pattern correlates with anything other than the quality of the ideas themselves.

Most organisations will find this conversation uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point. The brainstorm was never neutral. The room was never a level playing field. Acknowledging that isn’t an attack on the people who benefited from the imbalance — most of them didn’t design it and many of them didn’t notice it.

But not noticing has consequences. And the people who have been quietly watching their ideas leave the room in someone else’s name have noticed.

They have been noticing for years.

I want to bring in a perspective here that I think sharpens the argument. Des Kennedy has spent nearly forty years practising and coaching creative leadership, and his position, one I find genuinely useful, is that creative leadership is a practice, not a job title. It can be learned, built, and applied at every level of an organisation.

He writes about this at Applied Creativity on his Substack (deskennedy.substack.com). I asked him to add his thinking to this piece because he has arrived at some of the same conclusions I have, from a very different starting point.

---

Sven’s framing is right: you cannot fix the room by just redesigning the format. But I’d push it one step further. The reason format fixes fail is that power, when unnamed, doesn’t disappear. It operates without anyone having to own it.

The intervention isn’t a better protocol. It’s making power legible to everyone, before the session starts.

I’ve written about what George Prince called the First Law of Social Interaction: discounting and revenge. When a contribution is dismissed, directly or through a loaded pause, a smirk, a redirect — the person who made it doesn’t forget. They adjust. They contribute less, take fewer risks, recalibrate what’s safe to say. Multiply that across a team over time and you don’t have a creative culture. You have a cautious and potentially creatively ineffective one.

A Discount Policy addresses this directly. Not by policing behaviour in the moment, but by naming the dynamic before the meeting begins. Pre-agreed, shared in advance, with language people can use when a contribution lands badly. It shifts the responsibility from the individual who got dismissed to the group who agreed to notice it.

But the Discount Policy is the floor, not the ceiling. The more uncomfortable move is power mapping: making explicit, to the whole group, where authority sits and where it doesn’t. Who holds institutional weight here? Whose hesitation will be read as a signal? Naming it doesn’t eliminate it. But it makes it harder to pretend it isn’t operating.

From there and before the session begins: ask everyone, including the most senior person in the room, to write a short document about how they think best, what they need to contribute fully, and how others can get the most from them. That document is read before the session begins. Not as a team-building ritual. As an act of honesty about the conditions that will shape everything that follows.

On ownership: ideas in a group are almost always fragments. They arrive incomplete, get absorbed, get developed, get claimed. The simplest intervention is attribution like initials on every contribution, with the understanding that credit travels with the idea as it develops. It doesn’t solve the problem entirely. But it makes the drift visible, which is the precondition for addressing it.

One more move: create a named bucket for ideas that feel unsayable. Call it what it is “what would get me sacked”, or something close to that. The polite version of psychological safety is “no bad ideas”. It rarely works, because everyone in the room knows it isn’t true. A named bucket for radical or risky thinking acknowledges the real fear rather than papering over it. That acknowledgement is what actually creates permission and broader thinking.

The brainstorm was never a neutral space.

Acknowledging that isn’t cynicism. It’s where the real work starts.

---

---