Technique N°11 - The Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic

A little of role-playing will turn your head upside down!

At eÿeka we believe that everyone is creative as soon as one opens his mind and lets ideas flow freely. To help creators from everywhere tackle brand issues, we are providing you with Creative Techniques. Browse them, play with them and add them to your daily creative process to generate your best ideas!

The process of generating workable ideas is iterative. The first step is to generate many ideas then review their potential. To help you achieve this, a little role-play can help!

Let’s apply it to the Comfort - Water Saving contest: “Find an impactful yet emotionally engaging way to introduce Comfort One Rinse and its water saving benefits in a global campaign idea that you will illustrate in a print ad.”

The role-play will put you in the shoes of three profiles: the Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic. Each one has her own way of embracing problem:

The Dreamer has unlimited power to solve it
The Realist acts like an engineer
The Critic challenges everything

Follow the steps below to deep dive in this concept:

Write down your problem statement
Start with the Dreamer and imagine that you have free wishes to solve your problem. List 3-5 that normally would be impossible.

Select one wish and analyze it: How could you make your wish a reality? What features, principles or concepts are the most important?

In our example, it could be:
- Every time water is wasted someone appears to let you know
- When you are facing water related activities, you can listen to some voices that give you technique to save more water
- The used water can be automatically cleaned and re-used

Play the Realist and try to make one of the features you extracted into a reality by engineering it. How about we do something close? How to achieve something similar?

We can focus on the “Every time water is wasted someone appears to let you know” wish. The main feature is the alert system when water is wasted. The Realist can come in play: to engineer it one can imagine class lesson to the community to bring the awareness of water saving techniques.

Now as the Critic to challenge your practical idea. What are the holes in it? What don’t work?

The critic can challenge it: it’s difficult to reach those communities; it has a huge cost and the water saving techniques may not be remembered.

Integrate with your other wishes and go back to your initial problem.

When you go back to the initial problem statement, the global campaign can be of ambassadors that deliver techniques of water savings.

The Dreamer forces you to go beyond the reality and your standard mental models. The Realist brings your creativity into the reality and forces you to reconsider the problem in different ways. The critic transforms opens new creativity area by pointing out the defaults of your ideas (and thus forcing you to iterate).

Did you find new ideas to solve the problem? If yes, congrats! If not move on to the next technique!

Apply this technique on a real contest