Role-playing and Wishing

For this ideation technique, you start out by asking for the impossible and then brainstorm ways to make it, or at least some approximation of it, possible. The first step is to make your wishes tangible. Work with your team to generate 20 to 30 wishes about your business. Let your imagination run wild – the crazier the ideas, the better. Don’t restrict your thinking at all.

Next, focus in on several of these impossible wishes and use them as creative stimuli to generate ideas that are novel but more realistic. Mattimore recommends having your team think about the problem or challenge from different perspectives – such as the people who are affected by the problem, or as someone from another planet, who has never even heard of your profession or industry, would view it. This kind of role-playing helps get us out of our well-rutted paths of thinking and enables us to see new possibilities.