Reverse Brainstorming

CORE DEFINITION

A variant of brainstorming in which the group attacks the inverse question, asking how to guarantee failure, destroy customer satisfaction, or make the situation worse, and then reverses each answer into a constructive action. The technique was developed by creativity practitioners building on Osborn's work and is widely used in quality management and design. Its constraint is that it works best on problems with a clear failure state; for open-ended exploration with no defined failure, the inversion produces little. Inverted output still requires evaluation, since not every reversal is feasible.