Why brainstorming is a bad idea

Then, I would suggest trying a bad idea brainstorming workshop. There are many categories and existing products or services that you can draw from:.

Start your workshop by setting the stage and showing some examples of bad ideas, or asking your participants to bring their own to share. Clearly state the problem you are trying to solve. Why is this problem important?

Who is the target user you are trying to solve for? Are there any key guardrails or considerations? Ask everyone in the workshop to silently start brainstorming terrible ideas. They should be working individually and each idea should be written on a post-it note. As you walk around, try to push the limits on making their ideas truly awful. Divide the participants into small groups of people.

Within each group, participants should share their individual ideas. To make this activity move quickly, you can ask each person to share their top most terrible ideas. After the ideas are shared, each group should decide what idea or ideas they want to move forward with.

How can they push or combine what they have to make something truly awful? Now comes the fun part where you actually get to build your terrible solution. Make sure you have a selection of prototyping supplies available markers, paper, tape, playdoh, pipe cleaners, etc. If the solution is a product, each team should build a model. If the solution is a service, the group should roleplay and act it out. Many times ideas will contain aspects of both physical objects and human interactions.

The groups should call out key features and take on different user or employee roles. This step is the most important part in turning a fun activity into something actionable. Each group must take a bad idea and turn it into a good one. The groups can flip their own idea, or swap with another group. You then negotiate a fair price and hire a third party, or the vendor of the product itself, to assist in the installation.

At the end of this process, you have a modern payroll system that you can expect to meet your needs for years to come, allowing you and your decision-makers to move on to the next piece of technology that "must" be upgraded. Your CIO comes to you and tells you the payroll system needs to be upgraded because it is out of date.

Armed with this information, you determine that your organization has outgrown the basic accounting needs that drove the initial system selection, and that your requirements have evolved to include more sophisticated enterprise financial and HRIS capabilities. These systems should be focused on business intelligence, drill-down reporting, and real-time dashboard metrics that can be leveraged not just by the C-suite but also by departmental heads and revenue-generators in your business.

With these business-facing goals, the SMEs within your organization can map out an informed integrated business-driven technology approach to address the functional use cases as well as the important technical concerns about security, confidentiality, access, legacy integration, and user experience.

This is how business should dictate your infrastructure. Enterprise applications are expensive and require a lot of labor to properly implement and manage change. One bad decision can result in long-term commitments to dissatisfaction. This often presents cascading downstream impacts as well, as subsequent system decisions will have to include requirements to support or circumvent the misguided technology.

It is important to evolve your technology for a purpose, not simply because it is due for an upgrade. The best solution is one that is driven by business needs, leveraging technology that empowers strategic differentiation.

Glitter bombs in the galleries. Pony rides in the lobby. Free skateboards available at the Information Desk. These were just a handful of the intentionally bad ideas that a team at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. Bad ideas brainstorming is a method for generating novel solutions by pushing teams beyond the safe and status quo. A cross-disciplinary group of museum staff, joined by collaborators from local institutions and community members, were gathered together to imagine and prototype new digital offerings that promote access to the Collection and build stronger connections between the Gallery and its visitors.

The grant-funded project specifically called for the convening of an event that would foster play, creation, and innovation, using the Gallery and its collections as a springboard. Design sprints are facilitated working sessions that involve exploring and validating concepts with end-users through research and prototyping. Design thinking offers a method for cultivating responsive and engaging institutions and developing relevant and meaningful visitor experiences and programs.

But this was the first time we had explicitly instructed sprinters to generate truly bad ideas. Really awful, embarrassing, egregious, outrageous, impermissible, even taboo, ideas. And the results were phenomenal. We then had team members take three minutes each to share their bad ideas with teammates.

The howls of laughter even some snorting was contagious, and the room came alive. After each person had a chance to share their bad ideas, we asked them to repeat the Crazy 8s activity, this time adapting, digging deeper, flipping, combining, or exploring the opposite of the bad ideas they had just come up with.

The smart folks over at Design Sprint Academy have a nice variation on how to run the activity; they call it Evil8s and details are here in a Medium post. Some deliberately bad ideas generated in the first Crazy 8s exercise.

Another related idea was to only allow entrance to visitors with PhDs. These ideas were recognized as exclusive and elitist— positively bad ideas. But these bad ideas led to a new concept that the team is now exploring through prototyping: short, on-demand videos related to building skills and confidence around looking at art. Visitors can consume these videos in the atrium before heading into the galleries.