Everybody has heard brainstorming. Many certainly already done. Whether for complex problems or just the idea for the next gift. A simple and quick way to collect ideas and thoughts. Here, a question is asked and the team starts collecting ideas within a set timeframe. Through the dynamics of team collecting, ideas continue to evolve and the team gets more and more going. The most important rules are here that the ideas are not valued. Criticism is also not expressed. It creates a collection of many ideas.
Reverse brainstorming
But this is about reverse brainstorming. What is this? With the name we have to turn around a bit, but what? We turn the question around. How the look can look, let’s take a look at an example.
Gladly the example of the customer extraction is used. So our actual question is:
What can we do to win new customers?
Now it’s time to reverse brainstorm. Then our question is:
What can we do to avoid having any customers?
Here we go
And now into the collection of ideas. The team is now busy generating ideas why a prospect could not become a client. Here ideas such as: waiting times, unfriendliness, lack of functions, broken …. and many more points could appear on the board. Again within a limited time frame and of course the previous rules apply here as well, it is not evaluated and not criticized.
If the collection has already grown properly, the team can move on to the next step. The ideas are spotted, discussed and arranged a bit. As far as you can work with it.
Back to the origin
Now we turn our question back to the original state and go through the points piece by piece. Now we think about ideas how we can prevent this. What has occurred to us, may under no circumstances occur.
In the end there is a suitable solution for every point. Which is also our starting point to answer the question “how we want to win new customers”.
We almost go a little detour and answer the question with an opposing idea. As in normal brainstorming, reverse brainstorming is a simple and easy-to-use method that can produce great results.
You should just give it a try. Have fun and brainstorm.