Donna is leading a brainstorming session for her organization. She has asked the participants in this group to come up with at least ten ideas for possible solutions to an identified problem. What…

A fundamental rule of brainstorming is to generate as many ideas as possible without self-censorship or imposed limits, because higher volume increases the probability of surfacing a viable solution. Capping the session at exactly ten ideas causes participants to stop contributing once the target is met, which cuts off potentially valuable ideas that would have emerged afterward.

Time-boxing a brainstorming session is a legitimate facilitation technique, but this choice still retains the problematic fixed count of ten ideas as the success criterion.

Brainstorming is a divergent technique intended to generate many ideas, not to select the best one; evaluation and convergence occur in a separate subsequent phase.

Ensuring broad participation is a facilitation best practice, but it does not address the specific flaw of limiting output to a preset number of ideas.