Tell me about a time the people around you had stopped offering new ideas — and you needed some. What did you do?

Senior creative work is mostly ecology: novel ideas appear where offering them is safe and rewarded. Asking about a dry spell forces a diagnosis — why the ideas had stopped — before any technique, which is what separates cultivating novelty from running one brainstorm and moving on.

• Why had the ideas stopped, in your reading?
• What did you change about your own behavior?
• Whose idea surfaced that wouldn't have before?
• What happened to the first bad idea someone offered?

A diagnosis before a technique, a change to their own behavior — how they took rough ideas, who got airtime — a specific person and idea that surfaced as a result, and bad ideas handled in a way that kept people offering more.

The answer is a workshop recipe with no diagnosis attached, the dry spell is blamed on unimaginative people, the ideas that "surfaced" all turn out to be the candidate's own, or contributions were welcomed in the meeting and shelved after it.