The Bad Idea Technique

"The opposite of love isn't hate. It's apathy." -Wilhelm Stekel

"What if our product caused permanent, debilitating birth defects?" -Probably not the makers of thalidomide.

If you've ever been stuck in a brainstorm, marketing, product or brand meeting with a mixed group of stakeholders, you know the agony of an empty white board and a silent room.

Getting people to pipe up with their thoughts isn't always easy, but there's one simple trick that can get the juices flowing in the right direction.

(I don't know if I came up with this idea. I can't remember. If you know where it comes from or who originated it, please tag them and we can let the lawyers sort things out.)

You start by asking people to come up with the worst idea. The more specific, unpleasant, and oppositional to your goals, the better.

Why does this technique work?

For one, it's really fun. I know some people think work shouldn't ever be fun but that's why I don't work for those people.

It also requires people to actually think creatively and to put themselves in the shoes of prospective customers or end-users. We've all had bad customer experiences. This type of idea generation process lets you funnel all of the bad, dumb, hostile and counterproductive experiences into one awful idea.

But the third reason it works is because by iterating on the literal worst idea, you can home in on its opposite, and every improvement on the bad idea can only make it better. That's actual progress... I know: a meeting with progress? Crazy.

Imagine you're launching a new website for an email marketed product.

What's the worst idea?

"What if we collect people's emails and immediately sell them to the highest bidder scam websites that are banned by every search engine?"

Notice that even in this terrible idea, you would need a landing page that captures email addresses and it would probably earn some revenue. Not bad enough.

You could have a landing page that doesn't capture email addresses. Or, you could sell the emails to the lowest bidder dark web fentanyl dealers for less than the cost of acquisition. It can always get worse, and while it's actually funny to think of worse things, (and you should for as long as people are having fun with it!) you now also have some actual specifics to focus on.

What is the opposite of this awful experience?

For one, you need an email capture page. It needs to work, too.

When you capture the emails, the better idea than immediately selling it to a dark web drug dealer is to give the email recipient something of tangible value.

See? Now we're getting somewhere. What is the thing of value? Maybe we have a guiding principle to only send to our email list when we are giving them something of tangible value.

We've now generated a few major tasks and questions we need to consider. And we can continue re-iterating on the "worst" versions to come up with more thoughtful answers.

The white board will be filled with lots of details in the bad idea column, but you'll have nearly as many good ideas that can be assigned out.

And I guarantee you'll get better ideas than if you had just stood there and asked people to come up with ideas on the spot.