Turning ‘Bad Ideas’ into Brilliant Ones

There’s a moment in most ideation workshops where someone says, “Okay, let’s throw out some ideas, no such thing as a bad one!” And then… silence. Or worse, someone offers something brave and scrappy, only to be met with a long pause or a flat “Hmm, maybe not.”

Even in safe environments, the fear of being wrong, or wasting time, can stifle creative thinking. That’s why, in many of the workshops I run, I actively encourage bad ideas.

Because once we remove the pressure to be “right,” people loosen up. They stop trying to impress and start getting playful. And in that playfulness, valuable things emerge: unexpected metaphors, emotional truths, half-glimpsed insights. Things we can build on.

This approach can be especially useful when:

• A team is stuck or creatively blocked.
• Stakeholders are new to co-creation or wary of “design thinking.”
• You need to spark lateral thinking in a strategy session.

When facilitating idea-generation sessions, I sometimes run a “Bad Ideas First” exercise. It works like this:

1. Individually jot down the worst, weirdest, most unworkable ideas you can think of.
2. Share and deliberately make them worse, exaggerate them, break the rules.
3. As a group, pick a few and reverse-engineer the thinking:
   • • What underlying truth or need is hiding in this idea?
     • Is there a useful tension being surfaced?
     • What happens if we invert the premise?

One team once proposed giving every customer a bouquet of flowers. Not viable, obviously. But in unpacking it, we discovered a deep, unaddressed need for emotional connection and recognition. That insight led us to prototype a loyalty gesture based on personalised thank-you messages, far more scalable, and far more human.

In these sessions, we’re not just chasing originality. We’re teaching teams to recognise the value in early messiness, and how to mine even silly contributions for gold.

As a designer, I don’t just design interfaces, I design conditions for good thinking. Creating space for “bad” ideas is one of the ways I help teams collaborate without ego, generate insight from unexpected places, and move past surface-level solutions.