For your example, it might be something like this:
Goal: Reach 10,000 users (by experimenting with different marketing ideas)
Invert goal: Reduce the number of registered users to zero
Achieve inverted goal: Delete the database, remove the signup buttons, use confusing website copy, suggest better alternatives, remove the most valuable features, make it really easy to delete your account (even by accident), make the site unusable on mobile, block search engines from indexing my website, charge prices customers are unwilling to pay, only accept the least popular payment method
Achieve actual goal: [you can fill this in…]
Haha yes! Here's an example in a workshop I ran - it was with care nurses and the organization had major recruitment (and retention) problems and the vast majority were women because it's a low paid role seen as a "woman's job". Even more pronounced in rural areas. So we did a reverse engineering - How would we not attract any man to this position? That resulted in things like (just a few easy examples of the hundreds) :
- Pay them a low wage
- Be unflexible about working hours
- Don't allow their car expenses to be deductible
- Provide scheduling rosters 48 hours in advance
- Make them do the annoying administrative tasks
- Make them wear outfits they don't like
- Don't give them any technology to do their job more effectively
- Use job titles like sister and midwife and nurse
- Tell society men don't care about looking after people
- Use pink in the advertising for roles
- Use words such as nourishing, care provider and calming nature in job descriptions
- Only give them the nursing jobs that don't provide much progression or skills improvement such as aged care
- Force them to do rotations across all the types of nursing roles
- Tell them they can't care like mothers can
- Make double shifts seem like they need to be accepted to keep your job
- Never show them the cool professions and things nursing can do for them (assistant anesthetist for operations, travelling the world, military nurse, doctors without borders, teaching, ICU care etc)
- Don't subsidize childcare if they're with a working partner so he burns out in no time juggling the household and kids outside 10 to 12 hours shifts
- Make sure there are no personal days off, mental health support for dying patients, horrible events, reducing burn out
Then we reversed it with a goal (which I think is necessary for creative thinking). If we needed to have 50% men in the candidate pool in the next six months, what would we do? (education funnel issues aside of course). This inverted some but also added many many others that had nothing to do with the inversion as the brain is working.
A thing I noticed in the replies, including my own, is that many of the “how to achieve inverted goal” answers include a lot of “don’t do X”.
I wonder if that’s cheating? 😅
Because really you’re just taking your preconceived notions of what to do and inverting them so you can later invert them once again.
It would be interesting to try this exercise with the condition you can’t use the words “don’t” and “not”.
You are right. Maybe we need more examples to do it properly.
For your example, it might be something like this:
Goal: Reach 10,000 users (by experimenting with different marketing ideas)
Invert goal: Reduce the number of registered users to zero
Achieve inverted goal: Delete the database, remove the signup buttons, use confusing website copy, suggest better alternatives, remove the most valuable features, make it really easy to delete your account (even by accident), make the site unusable on mobile, block search engines from indexing my website, charge prices customers are unwilling to pay, only accept the least popular payment method
Achieve actual goal: [you can fill this in…]
Haha yes! Here's an example in a workshop I ran - it was with care nurses and the organization had major recruitment (and retention) problems and the vast majority were women because it's a low paid role seen as a "woman's job". Even more pronounced in rural areas. So we did a reverse engineering - How would we not attract any man to this position? That resulted in things like (just a few easy examples of the hundreds) :
- Pay them a low wage
- Be unflexible about working hours
- Don't allow their car expenses to be deductible
- Provide scheduling rosters 48 hours in advance
- Make them do the annoying administrative tasks
- Make them wear outfits they don't like
- Don't give them any technology to do their job more effectively
- Use job titles like sister and midwife and nurse
- Tell society men don't care about looking after people
- Use pink in the advertising for roles
- Use words such as nourishing, care provider and calming nature in job descriptions
- Only give them the nursing jobs that don't provide much progression or skills improvement such as aged care
- Force them to do rotations across all the types of nursing roles
- Tell them they can't care like mothers can
- Make double shifts seem like they need to be accepted to keep your job
- Never show them the cool professions and things nursing can do for them (assistant anesthetist for operations, travelling the world, military nurse, doctors without borders, teaching, ICU care etc)
- Don't subsidize childcare if they're with a working partner so he burns out in no time juggling the household and kids outside 10 to 12 hours shifts
- Make sure there are no personal days off, mental health support for dying patients, horrible events, reducing burn out
Then we reversed it with a goal (which I think is necessary for creative thinking). If we needed to have 50% men in the candidate pool in the next six months, what would we do? (education funnel issues aside of course). This inverted some but also added many many others that had nothing to do with the inversion as the brain is working.
Maybe that helps with an example!