Promise. There is more to gain from many bad, irrational, uncooked, unrealistic ideas popping up and rejecting them so that a good one can come up, than being obsessed with the generation of constantly good ideas competing with each other.
There is a tradition in Critical Thinking to look at things in reverse, upside down, inverted (‘Invert, always invert’). For example, instead of planning to succeed (only), dedicate some time to a plan to fail. ‘How can we make this fail?’ is one of the most practical questions to ask.
Failure and success, bad idea and good idea are not a mirror of each other. The opposite of failure may not be success, but survival (OK, that’s better than failure), and the opposite of a bad idea is not a good one. However, I sometimes wonder whether it is the inner killer inside us (!), the perhaps evolutionary mind defending itself from aggression and geared towards survival, that has made us become excellent killers.
Put two groups together, one with the task of visualizing success in a given timeframe (the company, the project, the strategic plan, the launch of a product) and another in parallel, independent, and both not talking to each other, tasked with visualizing failure, fiasco, complete screw up. When I do that, I ask them: write the script (as in movie script…) You’ll see the group tasked with success struggling to put the pieces together, carefully assessing all possibilities, and navigating in a bit of self-doubt at the same time. The other group, the failure driven. No probs. Straight to killing, everybody seems to know how to fail miserably.
So, starting with the inversion, producing not as many good or neutral or trivial ideas, but as many bad ones as you can, triggers adrenaline (and dopamine) and soon, the good stuff comes up.
Fast, very fast, and cheap, very cheap.
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