Tool / Ideation for complex operations
Twenty ideas in eleven minutes
Five operations for making a lot of ideas fast, out of things you already care about. Built for tangled work: dispatch, exceptions, handoffs, the routes and rules nobody can draw on a whiteboard any more. Bad ideas are the point. They are what a good one arrives hiding behind.
Stock the pile
The matrix combines whatever you give it. Vague ingredients make vague ideas, so put in the specific ones: the constraint you keep designing around, the exception that eats a dispatcher's afternoon, the hobby nobody at work knows about.
Three or more works best. Five is plenty.
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Then work down the page
Five operations are waiting below, roughly two minutes each. Each one gives you a prompt built from your own pile and a box underneath it. Type an idea and press Enter to keep it. Nothing is graded and nothing is deleted, so write the bad ones down too.
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01
Idea Addition
Jam two things together and say the result out loud, even when it sounds stupid. This is the warm-up, and the first few will be flat. Keep going until one of them makes you tilt your head. In operational work the tilt usually arrives when a rule from one lane turns out to describe a different lane better.
What do you get if you put one thing together with another thing?
From the original run Four flat combinations, then: using other people's presentations as prototypes. That one sounded nutty out loud and had already happened at work that week.
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02
Idea Subtraction
Say the impossible version of what you want. Then name the one thing that makes it impossible, and take it away. What is left is usually doable and still interesting. The impossible thing is nearly always a constraint everyone stopped questioning years ago, which is why nobody has tried the version without it.
What you want with one thing, but impossible. Now take away the one thing that makes it impossible.
From the original run The impossible idea was using prototypes to end climate change. The impossibility was that it takes many people. Subtract that and you get: the designers on the verge of saving the world. Which he wanted to read.
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03
Idea Multiplication
Take something that works at small scale and ask what it looks like at a hundred times the size. The interesting answers are the ones where scale changes the kind of thing it is, not just the amount. A workaround one coordinator runs in their head is a policy at ten, and a system at a thousand.
One thing, but a hundred times bigger.
From the original run Getting to know a local audience, multiplied, becomes video-interviewing people all over the country using the screening tools that had just started shipping.
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04
Idea Division
The opposite move. Take the big general idea and cut it down to one lane, one shift, one exception type, one customer who keeps calling. Most ideas get better the moment they stop being for everyone, and operational ones get testable.
One thing, but only for the people who care about another thing.
From the original run A general idea about handing out quests in everyday life, divided down to designers, produced five in a row. This is where the original session started cooking.
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05
Idea Sex
Cross the two things in your pile that have the least to do with each other. Not a combination, a hybrid: something that inherits a structure from one and a subject from the other.
One thing crossed with another thing. What does the offspring look like?
From the original run Guitar crossed with design: you can play a billion songs with three chords, so what are the three chords that make a prototype work?
What you made
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The five operations come from James Altucher's idea math in Skip the Line. I adapted them into a matrix, ran it once against a timer, and got twenty usable ideas out of eleven minutes. That version lived on a whiteboard and in a post that no longer exists. This is the same thing, without the whiteboard. I mostly point it at operational problems now: dispatch, exceptions, the handoffs that grew one workaround at a time.
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