This is interesting. I think the ability to come up with many alternatives instead of the leader’s yes/no is the reason Six Sigma events often use some form of brainstorming followed by affinity diagrams to develop what’s important.

The additional helicopter example might be an example of learning from history rather than creativity. The failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission in 1980 is a fairly famous example of a reliability and MTBF problem. They had the information available, but didn’t calculate or didn’t believe how many helicopters they would really need.