Inverse Brainstorming

We made our Magnolia 5.0 kick-off session to define what 5.0 is all about. In this session we opened our mindset and used creativity instruments to approach Magnolia 5.0 in a less technical way.

If found this very inspiring and would like to present the two technics we used.

Lets start with the inverse brainstorming.

Sometimes it is hard to find good solutions or new meaningful features. This is especially the case if one sticks to the very same topic for quite a while. What to do? We used a destructive variation of the good old brainstorming.

One simply inverses the question and hence we tried to find ways how to make things worse.

Some of our favorites?
- direct xml editing, upload with FTP
- support IE6 ;-)
- rewrite the JCR layer
- more editions
- drop CE
- develop it offshore
- write less tests
- don't use any libraries

Oh yes, that is fun, but in the analysis we saw how meaningful this statements are. It helped us to realize how easy it is to diverge from what we really should do. It is also surprising how some of the items could have been raised in a common positive barnstorming session but probably for the wrong reason.

With this method one can definitely trigger real thinking.

Try it!