#ThinkfullyHabit: Go extreme
Sometimes it’s hard to think beyond the familiar, even if the desire to do so is there. Going to the extremes can be a way to get beyond typical, obvious and predictable ideas. Going to extremes not only allows you to see ideas more clearly, it can help expose assumptions that are holding your ideas back and can rapidly open up the window of possibility in your mind. It’s not that all the final ideas themselves need to be extreme solutions, but the way to get to the best ones may be.
Product designers often go to extremes to get new insights. For instance, London-based innovation consultancy, Sense Worldwide, developed a new toilet brush by observing consumers with an obsessive compulsion for cleaning their toilets. By doing this they discovered that many of these people wrapped the bristles in toilet paper to minimise contamination. It led to the idea of biodegradable covers for toilet brush-heads; an idea that may not have been conceived without observing the extreme cleaners*.
“If you want to understand something, take it to the extremes.”
WHY?
Researchers have found that extreme stimulus helps people think beyond the familiar. They discovered that brainstorming sessions which included extremely unfamiliar, extremely ambiguous, extremely critical or extremely provocative stimulus generated twice as many unique and original ideas.
So next time you want to get beyond the ‘same-old’ ideas, think about what ‘extreme’ ideas and stimulus you could bring into that session. It could be extreme scenarios, extreme situations or thinking about extreme personas.
And what about those occasions when everyone has arrived at a brainstorming session empty handed? In those situations there’s only one thing for it. When the group starts to generate ideas, push them to take each idea to its furthest possible extreme. This may be about taking the biggest or smallest expression of it, or the most immediate or longest term outlook, or taking the most expensive or cheapest variation of it. Whatever it takes to push it to the extreme. Pushing to the extreme pushes people to think beyond the familiar.
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