Wildstorming is the radical cousin of traditional brainstorming in that it flips the process on its head, where weird and bizarre concepts are the rule.
During a wild storm session, team members suggest absolutely crazy solutions to the core problem being examined. Wild storms are a great place to ponder ideas that are truly over the top or prohibitively expensive. Wildstorm’s answers can negate physics and logic; they can be strange, fanciful or even illegal. In fact, they may be impossible! The main rule for a successful wild storm is that ideas should be anything but practical.
The reward?
Wildstorming is both an ‘icebreaker’ in thinking about a problem and an exercise in looking at a particular problem from a wide variety of angles, especially non-traditional ones.
Remedies discovered during a wild storm session would likely never be implemented; however, wild storms lead to creative ideas about the causes and effects of the core problem. The end result is new and innovative solutions.
How does it work!
Although wild storms by themselves can lead to the discovery of a novel response, the following three-day process is recommended to get the full impact.
Day 1: The method is explained to the wildstorm team, the problem is presented and a 30-minute wildstorming session is carried out. Every idea suggested, no matter how silly, is recorded by the scribe.
Day 2: This is the ‘share and rest’ day. The complete list of wildstorm results is distributed to the entire team for review and deep reflection overnight.
Day 3: The same team reconvenes to have a traditional brainstorm on exactly the same problem. This second session will have the new goal of trying to generate a new set of ideas that can be translated into real world solutions. You will be pleased with the results of following this entire three-day process. Don’t be surprised if snippets of previously crazy ideas from the wildstorm session are recycled into novel, viable, and superior solutions.
The bottom line: Wildstorming is a game that leads to real breakthroughs, higher productivity, and better teams.