Worst Possible Idea
Generate terrible ideas to find the good ones hiding underneath.
Asking for the worst possible idea removes the fear of judgement and unlocks genuine divergent thinking. But the real power is in the inversion: each terrible idea violates a principle, and that principle — once named — becomes a design requirement. Worst Possible Idea is not a warm-up game. It's a structured path to insights you couldn't get by thinking positively.
How to run this
- State your challenge clearly.
- Spend 5 minutes generating the worst possible ideas — the more absurd the better.
- Select the 3–4 most productively terrible ideas for inversion.
- For each, name the principle it violates.
- Invert each violated principle into an actionable direction.
Worst Possible Idea
IDEO · Design Thinking practiceIdeas that are just "bad business" rather than violating a real design principle. "Charge too much" is not a worst possible idea. "Make the customer do all the work" violates the service principle and inverts into something interesting.
An inversion that produces an idea you'd actually want to test. If none of your inversions are interesting, your original "worst ideas" weren't terrible enough.
When you have 2–3 actionable directions that emerged from inversion — not from positive brainstorming — and at least one you could prototype cheaply.
Try it interactively with WAiDE
WAiDE will push you to make ideas truly terrible, then guide the inversion process to extract the genuine insights. You'll leave with actionable directions and a session report.