BRX Pro Tip: Reverse Brainstorming for Problem Solving
Stone Payton: Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips, Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, of course, as you might imagine, I’ve come across the term, even participated in sessions that involved brainstorming. But you’ve got a little different perspective on this.
Lee Kantor: I think we’ve all sat in rooms where we tried to solve a problem in a group setting where we’re, you know, let’s all come up with ideas to solve this problem.
Lee Kantor: Reverse brainstorming is just a different way to attack the same thing, but you’re going about it in the inverse. What you’re doing in reverse brainstorming is you’re trying to use creative problem solving techniques, but you want to make the problem worse. So, you want to just sit there and use the same group of people, and instead of trying to solve the problem, you want to figure out ways that are going to make the problem worse.
Lee Kantor: Like if your goal was, okay, I want to improve customer service, then you would list a bunch of ways to improve customer service. If you were in reverse brainstorming, you would ask how can we provide the worst customer experience, and then you start brainstorming on that.
Lee Kantor: So, when you start looking at the problem kind of upside down, this is going to uncover different types of issues that maybe you hadn’t thought of, and it’s going to spark some innovative solutions that you might have missed because you were going down kind of a well-worn path previously.
Lee Kantor: So, anything you can do to kind of shake up the status quo tends to open your mind up to new ideas that you hadn’t thought of. And this type of reverse brainstorming really is a great way to kind of open your mind to things. When the regular methods have stalled or you’re coming up with the same answers over and over again, look at the problem totally differently or look at solving the opposite of the problem if you want to identify different types of risks and different types of weak points.
