The commercial folk wanted to create novelty - whatever novelty. The purpose of the result was not to be deep or insightful, merely to create moments diversion that could be spun into the marketing narrative.
Today, you can achieve the same effect by using oh-so-many random generators available in almost any context.
If you have a specific task in mind you would like the team to collaborate on, brainstorming is probably not a skillful technique to employ.
I would suggest that an online chat with a specific agenda, that is shared with all members, is a far superior facilitator for team collaboration and idea development.
If you want to leverage intuition, it needs time for individuals' brains to muddle over the thing. It needs GOALS, and it needs TIME. And then it needs a platform for sharing. A chat-based communication medium, combined with a collaboration platform such as Office365 or Google's offering is wonderful for this.
A high functioning team may engage in activity that to an outside observer looks exactly like brainstorming. People standing in a room, post-its are filling every vertical surface and the team is in animated discussion over some fine point. This is not brainstorming, this is regular team-based activity. It did not start with the explicit call to arms "Brainstorming time! Let our post-its combine!" but rather by the simple need of planning things and getting the Post-its out was probably the most natural medium of communication.
Brainstorming and regular team-based design work in a room with post-its have the same relationship as a plane landing on a field and a person guiding the plane to its parking spot with guidance flags. The guy with the flags does not call the airplane. The airplane comes anyway. The guy with the flags just makes this simpler. You can't call a plane by just waving the flag. Similarly, you should not expect novel insights by just locking people in a room with Post-Its and pens. This is an obvious reference to cargo cult methodologies ([2]) in general that confuse cause, effect, and trivial details into a wonderfully incoherent mishmash of silliness.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorming
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Brainstorming and regular team-based design work in a room with post-its have the same relationship as a plane landing on a field and a person guiding the plane to its parking spot with guidance flags. The guy with the flags does not call the airplane. The airplane comes anyway. The guy with the flags just makes this simpler. You can't call a plane by just waving the flag. Similarly, you should not expect novel insights by just locking people in a room with Post-Its and pens. This is an obvious reference to cargo cult methodologies ([2]) in general that confuse cause, effect, and trivial details into a wonderfully incoherent mishmash of silliness.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorming
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
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