Similes displace your thinking
How can you get people in your brainstorm meeting to think differently? A solid lateral technique is called Similes (sometimes knows as 51 Miles).
Gather your group. You state the challenge and then get everyone to write down on their own sheet of paper: ‘Our problem is like…’ Each person working alone then completes the sentence. They can make several suggestions. They must do this in silence so that they are not influenced by each other’s ideas. You are looking to find a broadly similar challenge in a completely different field. If, for example, your problem is in business then you would ask who has had a problem like this in warfare, sport, entertainment, transport, history, politics, education, health, research, ...
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