Sometimes you may find yourself or your team wanting good ideas and someone suggests a brainstorming session. It can be hard to be creative on demand – sometimes people need to be warmed up. One technique I have seen to help people get their creative energies flowing is to start with “bad” ideas. I am not quite sure of all the neurological mechanisms at work behind bad idea brainstorming, but I have seen it work.
At the start of the session align participants on the goal of the brainstorming session. If you are not aligned at the start it will be hard to get your desired results.
Now have folks individually spend time writing down all of the things that would be the worst ways to achieve the goal. You want to engage the entire group and you might want to use prompts like the following:
- What is the worst way to do this?
- What is a terrible thing we could do here?
- If our reputation did not matter, what might we try?
- What would a cartoon villain do?
- If we wanted to get fired, what would we do here?
Next, have the participants read off their bad ideas to the group. For each idea, have the group discuss why it will not work. This helps the group understand the contours of the problem. At the end challenge the group if they can collectively come up with even worse ideas and discuss why those are bad too.
Now have the group write down any ideas they have for solving the problem. Discuss these as a group and encourage the group to come up with even more ideas. Is it possible to invert any part of the really bad ideas to make a good idea?
A sample agenda for the meeting might be:
- Align on the goal
- Bad idea generation
- Bad idea discussion
- Good idea generation
- Good idea discussion
- Align on the next steps
A special thanks to Jody Medich who introduced me to this technique.