Design Thinking Methods Catalogue

# Ideate

# Reverse brainstorming

Purpose
Turning challenges upside down
Time required
10 minutes to 1 hour
Participants
Design Thinking team
Level of experience
Beginner

# What is it about?

Remove mental blocks by focussing on mistakes, problems and difficulties. At the end, the perspective is changed to the positive opposite and the correct solution is formulated.

# The goal

By looking at the question upside down, many creative ideas emerge that would not be obvious without the reverse perspective.

# How to do it?

  1. Formulation of the main question.
  2. Reformulation of this question into the opposite.
    • Original question: ‘How can we save unnecessary costs?’
    • Headstand question: ‘How can we generate unnecessary costs?’
  3. Collection of the most bizarre answers to this inverted question.
    • Heating on with windows open
  4. Cluster the answers into topics. Formulate each answer back into the positive opposite.
    • Reduce heating costs
  5. Select the most sensible upside-down answers. Develop concrete solution steps and ideas from these.
    • Efficient adjustment of the heating system

# When do you need it?

The reverse brainstorming method is suitable for questioning assumptions and examining the problem from a different perspective. This is particularly helpful if you want to generate innovative solutions or if typical methods have not yet led to promising results. In the case of difficult problems, this method can be used to overcome mental blocks.

# Resources

# Advantages

The new way of thinking leads to new and unexpected insights into the problem. This enables errors to be identified and innovative solutions to be generated. In addition, this method is usually a lot of fun and easy for the participants. Solving an absurd problem is easier than answering the original question directly.

# Disadvantages

This method produces many ideas that cannot be utilized: unfeasible, trivial, self-evident or not very useful solutions. This increases the effort required for follow-up. It can also be difficult to turn solution ideas into the positive opposite (step 4).

# Keep in mind

There are no wrong answers.

# See also

Previous methods Alternative methods Following methods

# Sources

← Mindmapping →