Do Your Worst
When I ask a group, “How could we improve X?” It usually generates a short list of ‘safe’, ‘sensible’ ideas. But when I ask, “How could we make X absolutely awful?”, then the room comes alive – the ideas come quickly, and it’s fun.
That’s the idea of Do Your Worst. By looking at how to make something worse, people suddenly see pitfalls and challenges they usually don’t consider – and once those are identified, it’s easy to reverse these into possible solutions.
Plus, this works equally well in the physical training room as the virtual training room or as an eLearning activity.
Activity Flow
- Form teams of 4-6 learners. If this is in the virtual world, utilise breakout rooms.
- Ask teams to create a list, on paper, of all the ways that they could create the worst[add your content] eg customer service, sales call, meeting, manager, leader etc
- Allow 4-6 minutes for teams to create their list.
- Say, “Now, with all of these great ways to develop the worst [your content] eg customer service, look at each one and reverse it into a positive action eg if you listed, don’t listen, then the positive might be actively listen.”
- Allow 4-6 minutes.
- Ask team 1 to share their positive list ie the things that people should do (you can capture these on a flip chart sheet (physical training room) or whiteboard (virtual training room).
- Ask team 2 to share any additional ideas that team 1 didn’t
- Do the same for each team ie only new ideas not previously captured.
You can now move into the content with a clear list of things to-do. The module could now be the practical way to sequence and perform these positive ideas.
Alternative ways of capturing the ideas (physical training room)
- Teams can work on flip chart sheets and add PostIt notes with the reversed positive action. All of the PostIt note actions can be collected together on a central flip chart for reference throughout the workshop.
Alternative ways of capturing the ideas (virtual training room)
- If the group is quite small, use the whiteboard in the main room with everyone adding ideas. You can remove duplicates.
- Use something like Padlet, Figjam, LucidSpark, Miro etc
Call to Action
Next time you want to encourage learners to create a list of things to do in relation to the content, ask them to generate a list of the worst things they could and then reverse each of these ‘bad’ ideas into a positive action.
