Big Little ThingsMore on curing negativity
To continue the conversation:
What if every brainstorm began with a meditation on impossibility, failure, stupidity, shame, etc? It might do wonders to get all that stuff over with before the brainstorming begins.
Yes! And here’s why: Idea generation sessions are often mistaken as idea selection sessions. There’s an expectation that part of the job of a brainstorm is to play the devil’s advocate, to make sure that nothing short of brilliance gets through to the execution phase. And as its much easier to write cheesy poetry about being sad, angry, or depressed, it’s also much easier to be negative and judgmental, than it is to find the worth in every idea. So ideas get killed in the moment they’re born. And that sucks, because:
1. If all ideas get shot down, participants will be much less likely to continue to contribute. And when nobody contributes, you get no new ideas.
2. Negativity is as contagious as positivity. If one person is bludgeoning every idea that gets floated, it gives others license to do the same. And again, you get no new ideas, only old dead ones.
The beauty of Axel’s buddy’s exercise is this: it sucks to wallow in the shit. It’s toxic. And you can only handle toxicity for so long. So it stands to reason, if you spend time exhausting all that negativity, letting the toxic stuff run its course, that by the time you get to the brainstorm you’ll want nothing more to be full of positivity, hope, and acceptance. And if you want to be it, you can.
Has anyone tried this or some other perhaps less formalized way of exhausting negativity? We’d love to know about it.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Never tried that per say, but we definetly make it known that even dumb ideas are good ideas in a brainstorming session. We try to make it fun, we try to even say ones taht are funny, that would definetly not work, but we throw anything and everything that comes to mind, because your bad idea, can help someone else derive a brilliant idea.
So I’m definetly for not shutting down ideas in a brainstorming meeting.
the way we usually do it, is we sit in a room around a table, and one person stands at our dry erase board and writes down every idea we get, then after all ideas are given, we then take a looka t start dropping some ideas.