Make a change: ideate for bad ideas
The story behind an idea generation tool that aims for bad, yet even worse ideas.
You enter a room full of anxious looks around a table, grab a chair for yourself and wait for what’s destined to happen. Your anxiety increases as an unspoken tension grows in the room. Your eyes focus on your hands clasped on the table, then move to the walls, ceilings and back to the flip-charts scattered around the room. You try to avoid eye-contact with others as if your nervousness would reveal. As you gaze post-its and pens laid on the table, your brain works hard to come up with legit excuses to sneak out of the room, but it’s too late. You had accepted the calendar invite weeks ago, and here you are. You just hope to get it over with soon.
We’ve all been there, right? As you might have guessed what I described above is an ideation workshop or a brainstorming session. Perhaps the scene is not always as dramatic as I described, but that’s how it feels for some despite the various fun and silly energizers and ice-breakers we usually turn to. The root cause of the nervousness differs from person to person but where the anxiety comes from could be common for many of us. In social situations, we want to be liked and accepted above all else. We carry the pressure to perform well in a group setting and have the need to impress our co-workers or boss in a work context. We can’t entirely avoid these contexts and since co-creation workshops are here to stay, thanks to the rising popularity of design-thinking, it’ll be up to us to address this issue.
One of the quick fixes could be revising the tools we use and creating new ones that would eliminate the pressure of having to come up with smart and good ideas. That’s the same pressure that holds several of us back from expressing our thoughts. Another thing that would cause us to be shy in group ideation format is our personality types. I’m not intending to open a can of worms about introverts and extroverts here but as being an introvert myself, I’ve witnessed so many times that a talkative and dominant member of a team assertively communicates an idea, whether good or bad, captivates the whole team and leads the thoughts of others in the same direction. I experienced this both as a workshop facilitator and participant, and it’s as painful in both cases. As a facilitator, it is so hard to help people have different perspectives on the problem when a talkative and dominating team member takes over since as humans we are wired to go along and follow leadership behaviors. On a second note, when team members are not comfortable expressing their ideas they eventually miss great potential ideas. No one wants this to happen. The other side of the coin, as a workshop participant, there have been situations which I got caught in the middle of epic power games of two extroverted characters. (Imagine a descriptive battle scene from Greek mythology here) All I could do was to try to get out of their ways, not to mention not having any space to share my ideas.
Thanks to my learningful(!) past experiences and love for creating and trying new tools for ideation, I merged two of my favorite tools into one and called it “Worst idea ever.” I first tried it in a safe environment that consisted of two other talented designers and me in an ideation session for an internal project we had. Initially, it was hard to come up with bad, yet worse ideas when we’re so used to do the opposite. After getting over with a few minutes of initial awkwardness, we leveled up our game with really really bad ideas for the problem we’re solving. Needless to say, we had a lot of fun with loads of laughs the whole time. You might be thinking what’s so tricky about coming up with bad ideas, that’s all we do throughout our lives, right? Believe me, creating bad ideas on intention is tough, making a bad idea even worse is tougher! If you want to give it a try, here comes the details.
What?
It’s an altered version of the Round Robin exercise inspired by the article on Interaction Design Foundations’ worst idea technique. You still come up with an idea without being influenced by any other person as in the Round Robin, but instead of improving each other’s ideas by passing it to others, you’re supposed to carry ideas in a worse direction.
Why?
In the creative process, we greatly benefit from unconventional ways of thinking and unexpected outcomes. However, this can be difficult at times since we build a strong connection with our own ideas; therefore it becomes so easy to get stuck and miss the opportunity of creating even better solutions. Once we remove to pressure of having to come up with good ideas, that’s where the real creativity shines through, and the ideas start flowing. If you’re rolling your eyes at this point thinking what you’d do with all the bad ideas you end up with, wait a minute. This is not a tool for only entertainment and ice-breaking purposes. The secret sauce is in the why’s and self-questioning parts. When you think more in-depth about why an idea is a bad idea, you’d quickly see that the idea is not a bad idea as a whole, but some aspects make it considered bad, and some other elements make it good still. When you think of why’s of your bad ideas, you’d also reveal the hindered insights of a problem. So the trick is to discover insights in your reasonings and picking up what’s good about your solutions to develop good ideas. Makes sense?
How?
Each person gets a Worst Idea Ever template and starts by describing the problem to solve and writes down a bad solution for that and explains why it’s a bad idea. Once everyone has written down a bad idea, have each person pass their paper to the person next to them. Using the neighbor’s initial bad idea as an inspiration, each person creates a worse idea than the first one by explaining why it’s a worse idea. It’s okay to keep the original idea, but it still has to be made worse. Be careful here because as soon as you read a bad idea your mind will automatically start generating good ideas in a blink of time. You’ll have to resist the urge to make the idea better and try harder to create a worse solution. Once everyone has written down worse ideas, they pass their papers once more in the same direction as before. So each person ends up with a new paper that has a defined problem, a bad idea, and a worse idea to solve that problem. By using the two ideas generated before, now each person needs to come up with an even worse idea, which, is hopefully the worst idea ever :)
Upon completion of the exercise, each person reads out their paper aloud, and the group has an open discussion. The facilitator takes notes and harvests the outcome.
Please feel free to use the tool and alter it to suit your needs. You can download the template here.
Here’s a reading list of the methods I mentioned as well as some others I love using.
- Rikke Dam and Teo Siang. Learn How to Use the Best Ideation Methods: Worst Possible Idea
- LUMA Institute. Evolve your team’s ideas in unexpected ways.
https://mural.co/framework/round-robin/
- Board of Innovation. Opposite thinking tool.
http://info.boardofinnovation.com/opposite-thinking-tool-pdf
- Futurice. Lean Service Creation.
Edit after almost 2 years
Remember how I encouraged you to alter the tool when I wrote this article. I had the chance to use this tool in an internal company event with about forty people and I made a small change to it.
In the third round when you swap the papers, you now have a template with a well-framed problem, a bad idea that solves the problem, and an even worse idea that again would solve the problem. Now your mission in the third round is to find a GOOD solution to the problem by using some of the elements in the bad and worse solutions described before you as inspiration. Cause why not?! Everything about life is yin and yang, there’s always good in bad and there’s always bad in good! :) Let me know how it goes if you give it a try!
