How To Use Reverse Brainstorming | Detailed Instructions | 2024 Reveals

You’ve probably heard of brainstorming, one of the leading methods to generate ideas effectively. But what if you’re stuck in a rut and can not come up with anything new? 

That’s when you need to try reverse brainstorming, a creative twist that turns the problem on its head. Instead of solving a problem, you should ask how to cause it. And, of course, you need to flip those negative ideas into positive solutions. 

In our blog, we will show how to use the reverse brainstorming technique to unleash your innovation. If you are ready to discover more, let’s get in now! 

Table of Contents

What Is Reverse Brainstorming?

Reverse brainstorming is a powerful method to uncover your problem’s root causes to find the best solution for your problem. By thinking of how to make things worse, you can expose your current situation’s hidden assumptions, flaws, and risks. From that, you can easily discover new perspectives you might have overlooked.

If so, how does reverse brainstorming work? From our experience, the reverse brainstorming method will naturally cover the following concerns: 

• Define your problem to have apparent navigation
• Ask reverse brainstorming questions to boost your creative thinking
• Collect ideas/reasons for making your problem worse
• Analyze each opinion or idea
• Flip negative ideas into measurable solutions 

Pros And Cons Of Reverse Brainstorming

After finding the reverse brainstorming meaning, it’s necessary to find out its advantages and disadvantages. In particular: 

Pros 

• Improve thinking patterns 
• Easy to approach unhidden/potential issues
• Create innovative solutions
• Reduce group think dominance

Cons

• Take much time to complete reverse brainstorming
• Risky at discouragement 

How To Use Reverse Brainstorming

Step 1 – Define your issue

Identifying the problem is the first and most important step in reverse brainstorming. All you need to do is to clearly define the issue you want to solve and write/list it down simply. Whenever you are in this step, let’s decide on a specific strategy to build your reverse brainstorming template model. 

For example, “We need to have the right orientation for our projects.” 

Step 2 – Reverse your issue

Instead of tackling your problem traditionally, you can try a new method in this case. This step was created to make an opposite requirement from the original one. From the example above, we will have a new assumption: “We have had the wrong orientation for our projects.” And, well, let’s look for causes to answer this assumption. 

Step 3 – Collect ideas

Here’s a handy formula: (Fill in the blanks)

We have had _____________________ (negative concerns). We might find relevant reasons, such as:

1. _________________
2. _________________
3. _________________

Well, let’s look at the example above:

We have had the wrong project steps. We might find relevant reasons, such as:

1. Distribute project resources ineffectively
2. Don’t define your project objectives clearly
3. Have misalignment among the team members
4. Don’t have strict management on your project scope
5. Lack of sufficient project communication
6. Don’t remove unexpected risks

Step 4 – Reverse the ideas 

Depending on your ideas in the third step of reverse brainstorming, let’s reverse all to find a respective solution for each idea. For example, with “ineffective project distribution,” you can modify it to “have effective project distribution.” Similarly, you can find all the answers for the others. 

Here’s our format to reverse the ideas: (Fill in the blank) 

For the reasons above, we can reserve in the following way:

1. The <reason 1> for _______________
2. The <reason 2> for _______________

Step 5 – Evaluate the ideas

After transforming your ideas into positive versions, you can evaluate them to select the best ones. Don’t forget to work with your team to get the most comprehensive solutions. And, of course, you can start implementing your solutions to strengthen the “right navigations for your project.” 

Reverse Brainstorming Examples

Regarding reverse brainstorming examples, we will mention the 2 most typical concerns, including: 

Sales

If you are finding innovative solutions to increase your team’s sales, reverse brainstorming can support you a lot. Here are some negative ideas that make your team’s performance worse, such as:

• Can not get the contact info to approach your customers
• Lack of communication skills
• Don’t follow up on specific KPIs
• Provide customer niche information vaguely 

Here are our final suggestions on these ideas:

• Strengthen daily conversations smartly
• Have KPIs setups clearly 
• Determine all information about your customers

Marketing 

The team normally uses reverse brainstorming to gain more innovative ideas for its projects. Basically, marketing activities require a lot of effort to get the finest results. In this situation, we will take an example: “How should we improve our website’s traffic on site?”. The following ideas will surely illustrate the potential causes of this problem.   

• Use a non-user-friendly interface
• Don’t optimize SEO values 
• Lack of UX features and impressive content

With these ideas laid out, you can spin them into positive ones, such as:

• Create an intuitive and user-friendly interface
• Optimize all UI and UX features on your site pages    

FAQs

Conclusion

We have just reviewed reverse brainstorming, together with how to use this method to boost your idea-generating performance. Basically, it’s important to determine your problems and reverse them immediately to find proper solutions easily. However, you need to consider the reverse brainstorming method carefully because it takes time to complete. 

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