nw-brainstorminglisted

# Structured Brainstorming ## The Separation Principle — Foundational Rule Generation and evaluation CANNOT happen simultaneously. Osborn (1953): "You cannot get hot and cold water from the same faucet at the same time — you only get tepid water." **Consequence for the agent**: All options must be generated before any option is scored. Never filter or rank during generation. Self-censorship during generation degrades both the quality of ideas and the quality of evaluation. --- ## Phase 1: HMW Framing — Set Up the Ideation Space Before generating any options, reframe the problem as a "How Might We" question. **Rules for valid HMW questions**: - No embedded solutions: "How might we make onboarding faster?" ✓ vs "How might we add tooltips?" ✗ - Outcome-oriented, not feature-oriented - Broad enough for genuinely different approaches - Positive framing (not "How might we avoid X?") **Example transformation**: - Feature request: "Add a dashboard to show workflow status" - Bad HMW: "How might we build a better dashboard?" - Good HMW: "How might we give teams confidence that their workflow is progressing correctly?" The good HMW opens the solution space: the answer isn't necessarily a dashboard. --- ## Phase 2: SCAMPER — 7 Structurally Different Lenses Apply each SCAMPER lens to the validated job to generate one option per letter. This guarantees structural diversity — each letter produces a categorically different type of option. | Letter | Lens | Question | What it pro