Generate Bad Ideas

Second City has launched the careers of Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Adam McKay, Seth Meyers, Rachel Dratch, Amy Poehler, Jason Sudeikis, Keegan-Michael Key, Horatio Sans, and Amy Sedaris, just to name a few. They’re masters at the art of ideation and experimentation.

When they’re developing their shows, one of the most dependable tactics they employ is known as “Taboo Day.” It’s a day where, once a month, improvisers bring an idea “that Second City would NEVER do,” either because it’s too outrageous, too expensive, or too impractical. Kelly Leonard (Executive Director of Insights and Applied Improvisation at Second City Works and the President of Second City Theatricals) told me that almost always, they get incredibly rich material from Taboo Day.

It reminded me of a tactic the rock band Aerosmith employs: they specifically schedule time called “Dare to Suck” meetings, where every member of the band is required to bring in material that they think is absurd. As Stephen Tyler said, “Most of the time, we’re right: it’s no good. But every once in a while, you come up with ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady.’” The goal is NOT to be efficient, but rather to increase the variance of the kinds of ideas being entertained.

In our Innovation Strategy course, we have students try a tool we call, “Brainstorm the opposite.” Simply take whatever your goal is, and try to come up with as many ways to definitely not reach your goal as possible. Many students credit brainstorming the opposite with breaking their thinking free of unacknowledged constraints that were holding them back. (As a funny aside, the tool was originally inspired by a podcast that mentioned the power of “reversing polarity” in breaking cognitive barriers, but try as we might, we could never track down the podcast that inspired the tool!)

The point here is that forcing oneself to create space for the bad has a way of releasing the censorship impulse in a way that very few other activities can.

So go ahead, try to come up with a bad idea. What’s the worst that could happen?

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