No matter how nice and experienced you are in brainstorming, you’ll find yourself thinking “yeah, but…” sometimes. If you follow the rules, you will keep your criticism to yourself. Still, doing that will momentarily distract you or can even throw you off the session. Here is what you should do instead: write it down. Just make a quick note about your nagging thought. In most cases, your concern will be a valid one, so why not get it out of your head and keep it for later use?

Once you start thinking about ideas in more detail (after the generation phase), you can try to get those thoughts out there. The goal at this point would be to create lots of “yeah, but”s in order to bust them later on. Essentially, these will generate further questions (subproblems) to solve in detail.

Even without critique, you will find counteracting forces while trying to create a solution. Think of these as connected levers. If you push one up, the other will go down. Here is an example: you need to gain ad revenue to a website. Your counteracting forces will be A) number / size of ads B) number of page views. Now, if you push A up, B will go down because people will get annoyed and leave the site. The question here is: What can you do to eliminate or circumvate the counteraction? Solutions can either focus on one of the forces or dissolve the situation altogether. For instance, getting ads that are part of the content (i.e. sponsored posts) would focus on eliminating the ad visibility. Pushing ads into a newsletter accompanying the site would dissolve it altogether.

A word of warning though: busting criticism or working on counteracting forces will generate solutions. They just might not be the right ones. Collect and break your “yeah, but…” only to move your mind into different directions. You won’t solve the weak points of an idea this way.