A ritual to put forward challenges, embrace contradictions and use these as vehicles to advance and move ideas further.
Why Peer Resist?
The Russian patent officer Genrich Altshuller conducted a study of more than 200.000 patents in order to identify basic principles and patterns in the world’s most innovative products. Altshuller found that successful patents primarily solved a problem emerging out of conflicting requirements or challenges. Peer Resist is a challenge session that aims at creating changes in the way people or groups think about and solve problems.
How does Peer Resist work?
# The team prepares a presentation of an idea or a problem they are working on. They invite in outside experts. The session starts with a presentation of the problem or idea in focus.
# The outside experts are encouraged to note challenges and contradictory evidence, or seemingly illogical reasoning (on post-it-notes).
# After the presentation each experts put their challenges, contradictions in form of assertions, statements, or questions up on the wall.
# The team and the experts join to reflect on and categorize the post-it-notes. The post-it-notes are rearranged into themes. Conflicting evidence, assertions or ideas are marked and put next to each other.
# All participants brainstorm how the challenges could be overcome, and furthermore, how conflicting ideas can be synthesized.
# Prioritize the best ideas and take them away.
Literature
Altshuller, G. S., 1984. Creativity as an Exact Science, Gordon and Breach Publishers, Luxembourg
de Bono, E. 1990. Lateral Thinking, Penguin, London