American business talk has a phrase for testing many ideas cheaply. It is “throw it against the wall and see what sticks.”

The phrase comes from advertising. A sister phrase from the same industry is “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.” Both phrases assume the same thing. Nobody can know in advance. The test is the idea.

American teachers repeat a sentence meant for the quiet student in the back. It is “there are no stupid questions.”

The idea has establishment backing. A 1970 Dear Abby column printed it. Carl Sagan wrote the same thought in The Demon-Haunted World: “There is no such thing as a dumb question.”

American teachers embraced the rule so fully that the 1980s produced a joke holiday. It is called Ask a Stupid Question Day.

In much of New England, the town’s legislature is a meeting of its voters. Once a year the residents gather and vote on the town’s business directly. There is no council to defer to.

Massachusetts still requires it by law. Towns with fewer than 6,000 residents must govern by open town meeting. The practice runs back to the seventeenth century.

Any voter may stand and speak. The meeting decides budgets, rules, and officers.

In June 1999 two groups independently used a new word. Ten OpenBSD developers met in Calgary to write cryptography code. Sun Microsystems challenged developers at its JavaOne conference. Both events were called hackathons.

The format spread fast. Facebook’s internal hackathons produced the Like button and Timeline. College teams now compete in events run by Major League Hacking. In a weekend, an idea is spoken, built, and demonstrated.

American elementary schools set aside a regular time called show and tell. Children bring an object from home and tell the class about it. The practice appears in print by 1950. The journal Childhood Education wrote about it in 1954.

The exercise looks small. A six-year-old stands up, holds the room, and answers questions. Speaking to a group starts in the first years of school.

From 1999, Google held a weekly all-hands meeting. It was called TGIF. Larry Page and Sergey Brin answered questions from any employee. A tool called Dory let staff rank the questions.

Products were shown there long before launch. Chrome appeared at TGIF more than a year before release. Over time, questions leaked to reporters, and attendance fell from about 80 percent to 25 percent.

In November 2019 the weekly meetings ended. Sundar Pichai wrote that the format was “not working in its current form.”

Amazon’s leadership principles include a phrase that many companies would find strange. It is “disagree and commit.”

Jeff Bezos explained it in his 2016 letter to shareholders. A team argues a decision. Once the decision is made, the losing side stops arguing and backs the plan fully. Bezos described asking a doubtful team to gamble with him on a decision he himself doubted.

The idea did not begin at Amazon. Andy Grove used the same practice at Intel. Today it is one of Amazon’s leadership principles.

At Pixar, a group of senior directors reviews each film in production. Ed Catmull describes the group in his book Creativity, Inc. He calls it “our primary delivery system for straight talk.”

The Braintrust has one strict limit. It “has no authority.” The director does not have to follow any of its suggestions. The candor survives because the film, not anyone’s standing, is at stake.

The group grew out of the making of Toy Story. Steve Jobs was kept out of it by mutual agreement. His presence would have discouraged people from being candid.

In 1953 the advertising executive Alex F. Osborn published Applied Imagination. The book gave a name to a practice his agency had used for years. Osborn called it brainstorming.

He set rules for the meetings. No criticism came first. Wild ideas were welcome. The group aimed for quantity. Improvement came later, when people combined the ideas. Osborn wrote that it is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one.