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Harness the Random with this Method

cube-689618_1920The use of chance is a key element in lateral thinking.  How can you deliberately introduce chance into your creative thinking?  The Random Word method is very good.  Here is another brainstorm method for you to try – Roll the Dice.

It works well with groups of 4 to 6 people and is excellent for forcing unusual combinations of ideas and settings.  If you have more people you can divide into competing teams in separate rooms.  All the equipment needed is a flipchart and a dice.

You select a challenge and then identify three or four characteristics and list six choices for each.  For example say you wanted to create a new TV drama you might choose the following parameters:

Lead Character Secondary Character Crime Location
1 Detective Vagrant Murder Hospital
2 Politician Postal worker Robbery School
3 Priest Shop worker Blackmail TV station
4 Company CEO Teenager Kidnapping Football Club
5 Doctor Journalist Fraud Restaurant
6 Teacher Window cleaner Smuggling Theatre

 

You then roll the dice four times.  Say you roll 4, 4, 2, 6 the team has to conceive and design a plan for a TV program about a CEO and a  teenager who get involved in a robbery at a theatre.  You could spin a coin to determine the genders of the two main characters.

The team spends 10 minutes discussing how this could work.  They might then roll the dice again to get another combination and see what they can make of it.  There are 1296 different possible combinations!  After three or four goes they select the most promising idea, put together a plan and present it to the other teams and the moderator.

I have found that this method can work well for new product, service and marketing initiatives.  It is quite remarkable how combinations that initially look unattractive can be moulded into interesting propositions.

Taken from the e-book, How to Generate Ideas

 

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