The Power of Bad Ideas

-Steve Portigal-

-The Power of Bad Ideas- by Steve Portigal

“Bad Ideas Company, another good day”

“I'm not bad I'm just drawn that way”

-Jessica Rabbit-

Ideation, or if you prefer, brainstorming, is a structured activity with many degrees of

freedom within that structure. When leading sessions, I emphasize divergent, generative
thinking, and ask participants to defer evaluation and prioritization. Defer, not disregard. Of
course we need to bring convergence into the process, but not until later. As you'd expect,
much of the energy and focus for these ideation sessions is on the creation of good ideas. But
there's an interesting important role for bad ideas to play.

In my team of user researchers, we deliver not only a report, but also an ideation workshop.
In this session, we pass the baton to our client team. Together, we not only generate a broad
set of things for the business to make, sell or do, but the team really takes ownership of the
research insights by repeatedly applying them. The act of repeatedly translating insights into
possible actions builds up a neural pathway, where the implications of those insights become
burnt into their thinking. Bad ideas serve both masters, as sacrificial elements that lead to
breakthroughs and as pitches for insight batting practice.

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Brainstorming during the design process

Creative activities often follow a double-hump model. At first you'll hit all the obvious ideas.
These aren't a waste of time; sometimes the obvious ideas have been neglected and you can
treat those as low-hanging fruit: obvious, easy to implement, incremental improvement. But
you'll find that you run out of steam with those ideas. Like the false ending in a '80s rock
song, don't think this fadeout means it's time to start applauding. There's still more. Push on,
and this is when you get to the transgressive, weird, crazy and sometimes innovative ideas.
That's the place you want to get to, where you are truly butting up against the edges of what's
allowable.

There's a drop in energy between humps One and Two, as well as many lull points through
the entire process. When that tapped-out, stuck feeling comes, a technique for moving ahead
is to deliberately generate bad ideas.

Bad ideas are not boring, meh proposals. Bad is not the absence of good. These ideas should
go beyond provoking "That's stupid!" to eliciting a much stronger response. Bad ideas might
be immoral, dangerous to the user or bad for the business itself.

Generating new concepts implies to give bad ideas

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In one session I led, a team proudly showed me their sketches of homeless people packed
onto trains and shipped away from the downtown core they were trying to improve. At the
time, I reacted to the general lack of humaneness in the idea and saw that as visceral proof
point of how they were challenging boundaries. It wasn't until much much later that I
appreciated the horrific evocation of the Holocaust. In this writing, and perhaps in the
reading, in the cold pixels of this piece, this feels grotesque. That's because in reflecting here
we are outside the environment of ideation. Within the context of the brainstorm, we have a
"safe place" where exploring what's possible without judgment is crucial.

When teams are creatively exhausted and the energy wanes, claiming permission to be
outrageous can re-energize that team about their task—coming up with ideas. Bad ideas bring
freedom and laughter, and remind everyone that they don't have to worry about being
"right." Occasional bad ideas replenish collegiality and boost team cohesion.
Bad ideas that are deliberately outrageous serve to lubricate the dynamic, but I also see bad
ideas that are framed as such only because the person presenting them is tentative. Even
without explicit permission to be bad, people may offer an idea prefaced with "Okay, this
isn't a very good one but..."

Using a version of the "Yes, and..." improve principle; the deliberately zany bad ideas make
good springboards for teammates. For example, "Okay, so you're saying shotguns in the
airplane exit for, but what's the strategy behind that? It sounds like we could offer incentives
over threats? Well, what else can we do with that?" Alternatively, the not-fully-confident bad
ideas provide a different trigger. When one person is uncertain, another person may respond
"You know, that's not such a bad idea" and go on to advocate for that idea or a slight
variation. Together, the team collaborates to remove the sense of failure and create
permission. This is how the brain works when creatively engaged. Sometimes
called combinatorial creativity, the brain wants to or even has to, figure it out. The
dissonance of bad idea prompts the grey matter to reorient and redesign until a related
"good" idea pops out.

Indeed what may have started out as "bad ideas" in brainstorming sessions sometimes appear
as actual products? Check out Philippe Starck's "Gun Lamp" done for Flos in 2005 for one
possibility.

Gun Lamp by Philippe Starck

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Bad ideas also make the group's implicit beliefs about boundaries into an explicit discussion.
If one person proposes airplane-based-firearms as a bad idea, it may be worth a few minutes
to align on whether or not that qualifies as "bad." Surfacing the group's unstated evaluative
criteria can open the brainstorming up even further. As well, the bad idea services as an
elicitation technique for evaluation criteria. While we want to defer evaluation during idea
generation, it's helpful to capture what criteria we want to come back to later. Ask yourselves
"Okay, if that's not a good idea, what is it about it that's so bad?

I once participated in a fascinating creativity exercise around the theme of bad ideas. The
room was broken up into teams. Each team was assigned a topic and asked to come up with
the worst possible idea. As you can imagine, we all dove in, producing ideas for products that
assaulted eyeballs with steel blades and no end of other horrible silliness. After all the groups
had finished, the exercise leader asked us to pass our ideas to the next table. Now each group
was asked to design the circumstances within which the previously bad idea would become a
good idea. No matter how disgusting the original bad idea was, each team was easily able to
flip things around. This quick and fun exercise made the notion of that framework within
which "bad" is defined into something very tangible, and could be a great way to warm up a
group about to begin an ideation activity.

Stay bad!

Reference:
The Power of Bad Ideas. Steve Portigal. Recuperado el día 28 de enero del 2014 de la página:
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/the_power_of_bad_ideas_22446.asp