The roadmap to your next breakthrough could be lurking in your bad ideas. These ideas often feel like failures, but they’re actually the starting point for inversion thinking: a practical method for approaching problems backwards.
Atomic Habits author James Clear calls inversion “the crucial thinking skill nobody ever taught you.” It’s free, proven and available to everyone. Yet despite its power, it remains an untapped resource for many professionals. With this one easy technique, you can pivot dead-end ideas into actionable ones in just three steps.
The power of inversion
When normal thinking fails, inverted thinking is a welcome form of mental intervention because it uncovers insights you already have, removes internal censorship and breaks habitual thinking patterns.
Uncovering insights
While good ideas can feel elusive, the brain has an endless supply of bad ideas. This is tied to our hard-wired disposition toward negativity, known as negativity bias.
You’ve likely already thought of many bad ideas for any given project subconsciously, but not captured them or explored their potential to pivot into actionable insights.
Removing internal censorship
Self-imposed mental filtering dilutes creative thinking. Bad ideas shouldn’t be avoided in the creative process: they’re important stepping stones. They might even be responsible for some of your favorite songs.
“The hundreds or thousands of dumb ideas that I’ve had are what led me to my good ideas,” shared Taylor Swift while accepting the Innovator Award at the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Awards. “You have to give yourself permission to fail.”
Breaking habitual thinking patterns
The human mind is programmed for routine and automation. We benefit greatly from this, but mental autopilot is a double-edged sword. Workplace trainer Bob Sager, founder of SpearPoint Solutions, LLC, equates normal thinking with driving on a mental race track.
“You think you’re thinking hard about it, and you are, but you end up right back in the exact same place because your subconscious process rules your thoughts and activity,” Sager shared. His technique, “the ABCs of bad ideas,” helps you exit the racetrack and go off-road to places you never expected.
The ABCs of bad ideas
The ABCs of bad ideas is an inversion exercise that Sager invented, though he doesn’t use the term “inversion thinking” himself. Instead, he champions its simplicity: “There’s often elegance in simplicity…. The simpler an idea or strategy is, the more likely it is to actually be implemented.” Try this simple approach yourself the next time you’re stuck in a creative rut.
Step 1: Make your A-to-Z ideas list
Articulate the problem that you’re tackling. Then, come up with a deliberately bad idea for solving the problem for each letter of the alphabet, from A to Z.
For example, say that you’re organizing a free company event and want professionals in your industry to RSVP. Some bad ideas for incentivizing attendance could be:
- A: Abandoning invitations and opting for word-of-mouth awareness instead.
- B: Being mysterious or obscure about what the event actually is.
- C: Charging a fee, even though the event is free.
The result is 26 bad ideas, some of which Sager says won’t be bad at all—just different. “Different is better than better,” Sager shared, quoting Sally Hogshead. Don’t censor yourself as you write this list. Push past the habitual guardrails that keep you on the same mental race track.
After your list is finished, ask one specific question to find which bad ideas can be pivoted into good ones.
Step 2: Ask the magic question
Look at each bad idea individually and ask: In what ways might I tweak this to make it a good idea? Sager said that this specific question “directs your brain” to find opportunities.
Looking critically at the corporate event example, opportunities to tweak the bad ideas quickly emerge. Abandoning invitations is risky, but generating word-of-mouth awareness is a strong idea that deserves further exploration. As for charging a fee, this contradicts the fact that the event is free. But you could charge a small fee for guests to RSVP, and then convert that amount into a free drink credit at the event.
Sometimes, specific ideas on your list jump out immediately as pivot points. Other times, you need to move on to step three to find your breakthrough.
Step 3: Revisit days later
After finishing your list, schedule time on your calendar to revisit your bad ideas in three days. Sager said this incubation period will give some ideas new “luster,” thanks to the background processing of your subconscious mind.
Scheduling this time on the calendar is key, or your odds of revisiting plummet.
Bad ideas thriving in the wild
Sager has taught the ABCs of bad ideas to teams, executives and entrepreneurs for years. He also recently did this exercise himself and came up with an idea that sounded really bad at first glance: a 24-hour video livestream.
At face value, it wasn’t a good idea—but it surely was different. Sager realized it was strange enough to attract the attention of dozens of guests, potential sponsors and hopefully many curious attendees.
No one will watch the entire livestream, but Sager expects attendees to jump in and out, all asking the same question: What does Bob look like after six, 12 and 23 hours of livestreaming?
Another ABCs of bad ideas success story comes from a business owner who supplies snacks for corporate breakrooms. The bad idea? Don’t throw away your trash—build something out of it in the breakroom. It turned out that this idea didn’t need any pivoting at all: it was implemented, and it was different enough to engage and entertain people after they ate the last granola bar in the box.
Invert everything
As business icon Charlie Munger once said, “Many problems can’t be solved forward.”
Project managers perform premortems to anticipate where a project can fail, instead of focusing exclusively on how it can succeed. Musicians practice musical licks backward to learn a difficult series of notes. Language teachers have students pronounce words or sentences in reverse order.
Inversion is everywhere. I hope that inversion thinking has helped you see value in your bad ideas. At a time when so many people are turning to ChatGPT for the same instant answers, your bad ideas have never had more creative power.
Photo by Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
