Related Activities
- As Easy As 6–3–5 [81]
- Brain Purge [82]
- Idea Mixer [84]
- Idea Pool [85]
- Museum Madness [86]
Procedure
- Distribute the Altered States Handout, review it with the participants, and answer
any questions they may have. - Distribute to each group members one copy of the Altered States Questions Hand-
out. - Instruct the participants to answer the four questions, individually and in writing,
and list three bizarre, wild, altered states for each question. Encourage them to
avoid over-analyzing or being too concerned with practicality, and try to be spon-
taneous. - After they have finished answering the questions, instruct the group members to
pass their lists to another group member. - Instruct the group members to examine the lists they receive, use the responses to
trigger ideas, write them down on Post-it®Notes (one idea per note), and place the
notes on a flip chart for evaluation.
Debrief/Discussion
One positive feature of this exercise is that the questions force participants to move out of
their narrow perceptions about a problem and create novel ones. Of course, the altered
states themselves may seem bizarre at first to people not accustomed to using unrelated
stimuli. However, most people catch on relatively quickly, especially after reviewing the
Altered States Handout. Another positive is that group members use the altered states of
others, rather than the ones they generated. This is another wasy to force people to think
differently about a problem to which they may have become too close.
Also consider having participants debrief using the following questions:- What was most helpful about this exercise?
- What was most challenging?
- What can we apply?
- How would you rate the value of this exercise to helping us with this issue?
- Will this exercise be helpful in the future for other sessions?
- What did you learn?
- What will we be able to use from this exercise?
- What ideas were generated, and which ones were most interesting?
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