Antifragility in Brainstorming: Welcome Wild Ideas

Brainstorming sessions are inherently chaotic, making them a prime opportunity to apply antifragile thinking. Let’s see how.

1. Welcome Wild Ideas. Antifragility thrives on diversity of thought. Encourage team members to share bold, unconventional ideas, even if they seem impractical. Sometimes, these outlandish ideas reveal insights that lead to breakthroughs.
2. Stress Test Ideas. Once ideas are on the table, challenge them with hypothetical situations that could break them. This process will reveal their weak points and allow you to make them stronger before implementation.
3. Iterative Brainstorming: never aim for a perfect solution in one go. Instead, treat brainstorming as an iterative process. Revisit ideas after feedback and allow them to evolve over time, gaining strength from the challenges they face.
4. Mix Up the Team. Bring in people from different departments or backgrounds for brainstorming. Just like in nature, diversity leads to resilience. Fresh perspectives can challenge conventional thinking and lead to more robust solutions.

Through some of the excellent 75 Tools for Creative Thinking, now unfortunately out of stock, let’s see some activities that might help you with the first aspect. These are parts of the “Break Free” section (section D).

1. Trick Questions

Why? To transform negative short-sighted statements about a situation or a problem into possibilities or opportunities.

Steps of the activity.

1. List all the insight or data you possess about a situation or a problem. This might need further activities but we don’t have all day.
2. Highlight the negative forms (es: “don’t feel comfortable” or “feel uncomfortable”, “poor results”, “low sales”.
3. Transform every negative form into positive “How to” questions such as “How to make people comfortable doing X?”
4. Complete every “How to” question by adding the necessary Ws to make them as detailed as possible: Who, What, Where and When. For example: “How to make clients in their 20s more comfortable in resharing our Instagram content when we tag them in our stories?”

2. Inject some Absurdity

The second part of the activity involves working by word association. Here are the proposed steps for the activity.

1. Select a question from the previous activity.
2. Highlight the keywords that indicate what and how. The tool proposes the following example: “how to involve children in spreading the word of anti-violence campaign through online media in a persuasive way?”, where “what” is “spreading the word” and “how” is “persuasive”.
3. Use the highlighted keywords to brainstorm a word chain association. Following the given example, “spreading the word” generates gossip > rumour > whispering > ear, while “persuasive” generates the chain salesman > persistent > annoying > mosquito > malaria.
4. Choose one pair of words and replace the keywords in the original question. “How to involve children in spreading the word of anti-violence campaign through online media in a persuasive way?” becomes “how to involve children in the whispering of an anti-violence campaign through online media in a mosquito way?”
5. Guide the team while they try to answer this new question with up to three ideas.
6. Reflect on whether there is an interesting analogy or a possible answer to the initial question.
7. Repeat steps 3 to 6 several times to generate more ideas (while making sure that analogies aren’t repeated).