Reverse Brainstorming Café Brainstorming the opposite of what you want

Street Epistemology

Theodore Zeldin’s Conversation Dinners

Coming up with new ideas or insights in a conventional brainstorming session is often hard work and not very engaging. An alternative approach is the so-called reverse brainstorming.

Overview of the process

The concept of reverse brainstorming is simple: rather than brainstorm what you want – brainstorm the opposite of what you want. For example, if you would like your project to succeed, don’t ask, “How do we ensure our project is a success?” but ask, “How do we ensure that our project is a total miserable failure?”.

This alternative approach harnesses negative energy, such as cynicism, sarcasm, and hostility, to spark creativity.

So, in brief, a reverse brainstorming cafe is a reverse brainstorm where the participants are first asked to discuss and list all the things that should be done to ensure that something is NOT successful.

They are then taken through a process of prioritizing those items and coming up with antidotes, i.e., things that would ensure the failures would not happen. Next, they share these possible responses and insights between the groups.

This is tremendous fun and works exceptionally well as people engage with the idea of reverse thinking. Paradoxically, it is easier and more fun for people to think about why something fails rather than what needs to be done to make it a success – having thought about failure – it’s easy to switch mindsets and reverse things.

This tool can be used to generate and capture ideas for further action or, like a Knowledge Café, it can be used to improve the understanding of a topic and draw out the different perspectives of the group members.

Example Questions

Designing a good question is critical to this process. Here are a few examples:

• How do we ensure our profession has no future?
• How do we ensure that a KM initiative is a total failure?
• How do we ensure that a project fails?
• How do we utterly destroy collaboration in our organization?
• What are the most innovative and creative strategies to decimate key organizational staff?

Outline of the process

• The facilitator talks about the theme and poses the question. They also explain the process. (10 mins)
• The participants break into groups of four or five (no more). Each group has a flip chart. They are asked to brainstorm the question and to write on the flip chart as many things as they can think of that will ensure the destruction of their profession. The more outrageous and destructive, the better. (10 mins)
• The facilitator asks people to wander around the room, look at the flipcharts, and see what others have created. (10 mins)
• The facilitator asks each group to identify the top three items on their list. (10 mins)
• The facilitator goes around the room and invites each group to share their items – giving a few more words of explanation. (10 mins)
• The facilitator asks them to think about their three items and come up with three antidotes to them. i.e., three things that, if they did well, would ensure that their profession has a bright future. (10 mins)
• The facilitator goes around the room and asks each group to share their items – giving a few more words of explanation. (10 mins)
• Finally, they invite them to sit at their tables and share their experiences and insights from the session in their group. Then, they are brought back together and have a large group conversation about the session and what they have learned. (20 mins)

Timings are a guideline only, and the time is tight at 90 minutes total for about 30 people. Two hours would be a better allocation of time. This process works best with about 30 people, i.e., six groups of five. More time would be required for a larger group.

Credit: This is a well-known facilitation technique, but I have adapted this process from one I learned from Victor Newman

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