"You create four buckets for solutions to a problem: Ideal: If I had a long time horizon to solve this problem Realistic: If I had limited time and resources Wasteful: If I didn't care about time and resources at all Harmful: If I wanted to sabotage the problem And participants are tasked with populating each bucket. Here's the fun part: actively harmful and wasteful solutions often lead to the best outcomes."
"All of these ideas have problems. Technical writers will not have the context and could put undue communication burden on the team, company mandates are never fun, encouraging quantity of contribution can lead to decrease in quality, and deleting the data defeats the purpose of having a wiki in the first place. But this gets you thinking - maybe the harmful idea isn't so harmful after all."
A four-bucket brainstorming technique separates ideas into Ideal, Realistic, Wasteful, and Harmful categories. Participants populate each bucket to generate options across time horizons and constraints. Wasteful and harmful prompts encourage extreme, surprising possibilities that bypass reputation and self-censorship. Example ideas for a neglected team wiki include hiring technical writers, a mandatory cleanup day, cash awards for volume, or self-destructing pages. Evaluating trade-offs of each idea reveals flaws and inspires hybrids. A mitigated solution such as staleness banners with last-editor nudges can capture the benefits of extreme prompts while avoiding their downsides.
Read at Ruslan Osipov
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