This took me way back to when I worked at Microsoft Research for a couple years in the late 90s. When some technical issue came up our manager would say, “Let’s brainstorm this.” Somebody would say an idea, which somebody else would immediately shoot down for technical reasons. Then there would be a second idea and it would get shot down. Occasionally there were brief disagreements over the shootdowns - somebody might say the shootdown was wrong and give a different reason the idea wouldn’t work. But anyway, after two ideas had been proposed and shot down the group would get quiet, because nobody wanted to say anything else and get shot down. So after a few seconds of silence the manager would say okay let’s take this offline, and would pick one or two people to meet in her office afterwards, and they would decide something.

That was how these ALWAYS went in that group. Every. Single. Time. Very consistent. Nobody had any idea what “brainstorming” meant.