Ten bad ideas
Outrun the inner critic by demanding badness first.
Variants
- default
Data fields
The fields a spec's page can set for this component (see switchback show ten-bad-ideas --json):
prompt
Grounding
Helps: when wanting a good idea is what stops the first one being written; later ideas in a run tend to be a little more original, a small tendency that is unreliable for any one person, and asking for bad ideas is untested craft, so treat the ten as a warm-up and read the later boxes first
Backfires: when "bad" turns into jokes rather than range, or when ten is too few to get past the obvious answers: the studies of later ideas being more original used timed runs of several minutes
- DSeparating idea generation from evaluation, with judgement deferred until generation is done, increases the number of ideas without reducing, and sometimes increasing, the number of good ones.Osborn (1953), Applied Imagination
- DInstructing people to generate deliberately bad ideas lowers self-censorship and yields more ideas, including some usable ones, than instructing them to generate good ideas.Harrington (1975)
- BIn a single idea-generation run, later ideas tend to be more original than earlier ones.Beaty & Silvia (2012), Gilhooly et al. (2007)