The reason that most brainstorming sessions are painful and unproductive is that when assembling participants, we tend to gather our peers.
The trouble with this is that, if we are all electrical engineers, when racking our brains for ideas, we open those drawers where we store all our electrical engineering knowledge. And guess what? We keep finding all the same old stuff.
We cannot generate an original idea by connecting ideas that have already been connected over and over again.
Research shows that people with broad (that is, diverse) social networks are 3 times more creative than those with deep social networks – that is, a lot of friends in the same business.
