brainstorming

# Brainstorming ## When to Brainstorm vs When to Decide **Brainstorm** when: - Multiple valid approaches exist - You don't yet know the constraints - The cost of choosing wrong is high - You want to surface blind spots **Decide immediately** when: - One approach is clearly better - Time is critical and any reasonable option works - The decision is easily reversible ## Technique 1: Six Thinking Hats Work through each lens sequentially before converging. ``` WHITE HAT — Facts & Data "What do we know for certain?" "What data do we have? What data do we need?" Example: "We have 10k users. P95 response time is 2s. Database has 1M rows." RED HAT — Gut Feelings & Emotions "What feels wrong about this?" "What are we uncomfortable with?" Example: "This approach feels fragile. I'm not confident in the third-party service." BLACK HAT — Critical Thinking & Risks "What could go wrong?" "What are the weaknesses?" Example: "If the cache fails, we hit the DB directly and it falls over." YELLOW HAT — Optimism & Benefits "What's the best-case scenario?" "What does success look like?" Example: "If this works, we reduce load by 80% and can scale without upgrading the DB." GREEN HAT — Creativity & Alternatives "What else could we do?" "Are there completely different approaches?" Example: "What if we precomputed this nightly? What if we used read replicas?" BLUE HAT — Process & Facilitation "What's our decision process?" "What do we need to decide today...