In this video, I'm going to give you an exercise to do. It's going to be an exercise in *bad ideas*. This is where I tip your brain towards madness. But, hopefully – the boundary between creativity and genius and total madness is often said to be a thin one; so, by pushing you a little towards madness, I hope to also push you a little towards creativity.
And hopefully, you can control the madness that comes there. But we'll see as it goes along. So, what I want you to do is – you know how hard it is to think of good ideas; everybody says, "Ah! Let's have a brainstorming session and have lots of ideas!" and (sound effect), right? So, if it's so hard to think of good ideas, why not think of a *bad idea*? So, what I'd like you to do as an exercise is just to think of a bad idea or a silly idea, a completely crazy idea.
Now, it might be about something that you're doing at the moment. Or it might be a particular problem you've got. And so, what would be a really bad idea... for sending notifications to people about something you want to get them engaged in? Perhaps you could send them an email every three seconds or something like that! So, it could be that kind of bad idea, or it could be just an idea from the world.
And it could be a Heath Robinson sort of bad idea – something that's complex and arcane and that. Or perhaps – and this is probably a good one to start with – just an *oxymoron*. So, something like a chocolate teapot, so something that appears to be really crazy, really silly; a car without an engine – I remember once in a session we had this – that doesn't seem like a good idea. So, you've got your bad idea – it may be a chocolate teapot
or it may be the car with no engine or something like that. What I want you to do now is – I'm going to take you through some prompt questions. First of all, this was a bad idea – the reason you chose it was because it was a bad idea. So, what I want you to do is say to yourself, "What is bad about this idea?" So, think of the car without an engine. What's bad about a car without an engine? Well, it doesn't have an engine; it's obvious, right?
So, you start off with that. Now, you might think a bit more. But then I want you to dig and say, "Well, *why* is that a bad idea?" Well, it's not got an engine – it can't go anywhere. Then dig a bit back further; so, are there things that you can think of that are like that, that have that property? So, for instance, a car without an engine can't go anywhere. Are there things that can't go anywhere that's actually a good idea? Well...
a garden shed: a garden shed doesn't go anywhere, but that's not a bad idea. And, in fact... you might want to have something that can't be stolen; you don't want that to go anywhere. So, that's not a bad idea. So, if you can think of things that appear to share the bad thing but actually aren't bad, what's the difference? Why is not having an engine, why is not being able to go anywhere bad for the car but not bad for the garden shed?
And as you dig into this, hopefully you start to understand better these things. You can also go the other way around. So, you *know* this is a bad idea, but maybe there's something good about it. It hasn't got an engine; it's not polluting. Wow, we've got a green car! It will be green because all the moss will grow on it because it doesn't drive anywhere, but – you know – "This is good, surely?!"
So, then you can think, "Well, okay, if this is a good thing" – you can do the same sort of thing: "Why is that a good thing?" Well, it doesn't choke you with its pollution. If you're finding this difficult – and particularly this is true about the bad idea bit – you want to say... with the bad idea, you want to change that bad thing into a good thing; so, this is whether you want to find a good thing in the bad idea or you want to find a good use for the thing you've identified that's bad – you might try a *different context*; so...
if you take the car off the road and put it perhaps into something where it's moved along by something else – perhaps sitting on the back of a lorry... why, you might want that – well, you might want it so you can easily move your car. You might put it onto something that's dragged along. So, you sometimes change the context and suddenly something that seemed bad suddenly is not so bad. So, the final thing you can do with your bad idea is *turn it into a good idea*.
Now, you might have already done this as part of that process. So, what's *good*? When you've identified something that's good about it, like the car, that it wasn't polluting, try to hold on to that – try to keep that and retain that good feature. But where you found the things and you really dug down to *why something's bad*, not just the superficial – you know – it doesn't have an engine; well, that's not bad in itself,
but the fact that means you can't drive anywhere in it; okay, that's bad. So, can you change that badness but still retain the non-pollutingness? So, perhaps we're going to have a truly green car. Perhaps we're going to have roads with sort of little wires you connect into and – you know – a bit like Scalextric cars, so you can drag the cars along so they don't have an engine and they're being powered elsewhere. You may, I said, *change the context entirely* – so, instead of it being a car for driving around in
– well, I've already mentioned this one – stick your chickens in it and it suddenly becomes a hen coop. And I think if you go around the the world, you'll find a lot of old cars usually actually with their engines still sitting in them that are being used as hen coops. If you had a *complex idea* – and this is true, it could be for a simple idea, but in doing your thinking, there might be just something about it, something small;
it wasn't necessarily the whole thing. So, actually – you know – the idea of the gap in the engine; perhaps you decided that would be really good actually having the engine not there because you could put things in the front, and for whatever reason, you think it's easier to put things in the front than the back. So, perhaps that becomes your idea – that actually, you'd quite like to be able to put your luggage in the front of the car; you'd like more room in the car for luggage. And then perhaps you'll put an engine back in the car, but thinking about
how you actually improve access for luggage. If you've had one of those Heath Robinson complex ideas, Wallace and Gromit-like ideas, then actually you may not be trying to make the whole thing into a good idea; but within it, some little bit of that complex mechanism might be something that you've thought about; you've realized and suddenly think, "Ahh!" and do something just with that. And I'll leave you with a glass hammer!