Brainstorming terrible ideas in a group

Years ago a colleague of mine taught me a brainstorming technique that I find particularly useful. Thanks, Meagan.

Here’s the thing. Often, when brainstorming in a group, even with a good degree of psychological safety, participants are often worried about appearing like idiots, or having bad ideas. There’s a reputation to maintain after all, and we’re all taught to think before we speak. I find this group brainstorming method to be useful to get around this mental block.

You create four buckets for solutions to a problem:

Ideal: If I had a long time horizon to solve this problem
Realistic: If I had limited time and resources
Wasteful: If I didn’t care about time and resources at all
Harmful: If I wanted to sabotage the problem

And participants are tasked with populating each bucket. Here’s the fun part: actively harmful and wasteful solutions often lead to the best outcomes.

Let’s walk through the example. Say you have a team wiki that’s neglected and out-of-date. You’re trying to figure out how to solve this problem. Here are the ideas:

Ideal: Hire technical writers to constantly audit and rewrite the documentation.
Realistic: Implement a mandatory wiki cleanup day, where each team member is assigned a portion of the wiki to update.
Wasteful: Award $500 to whoever contributed the most pages to the wiki each year.
Harmful: Set content to self-destruct after 3 months. If the content is important, someone will write it again.

All of these ideas have problems. Technical writers will not have the context and could put undue communication burden on the team, company mandates are never fun, encouraging quantity of contribution can lead to decrease in quality, and deleting the data defeats the purpose of having a wiki in the first place.

But this gets you thinking - maybe the harmful idea isn’t so harmful after all. Maybe a staleness banner on pages, with a name of the last editor and a nudge to them could help keep the wiki up-to-date.

In my experience, “Wasteful” and “Harmful” buckets have a disproportionate number of responses, many of which start as jokes (“fire everyone”, “reboot every 5 minutes”, “use carrier pigeons”), and improve upon iterations into the winning ideas.