![]() We love using extreme examples. They’re so helpful. They can really get you to the crux of a creative dilemma—or others—very quickly. Allow us to explain. So many times, in the creative field, you’ll be tasked with coming up with a novel approach to a given challenge; that’s the whole “creation” thing. And more often than not, the person handing you the assignment—your superior in the organization, or the client—will not want something extreme from you. They hardly ever ask for something that’s over-the-top in its creative interpretation and/or execution. So why do we love extreme examples so much? Calibrate your creative compass Like you, we find our assignments are more often vanilla than jalapeño. But using vanilla to solve for vanilla is unproductive. How can you take a bland concept and amp it up to the level you desire? You can’t. There’s nothing there to dial up. See where this is going? But if you start with an extreme concept, it’s easy to dial it down. To pull it back. And here’s the important part: It’s easy to pull it back to any level of intensity you desire. Now isn’t that useful? So start with the most extreme, over-the-top interpretation of a creative solution that you can possibly think of. We do this all the time. What if that ad for, say, a new software solution depicted, um, well, murder? Whaaat? Yeah. Go there. This is a creative exercise, wherein the end will justify the means. It’s also a lot of fun. So you’re now ideating an ad for an app in which someone is killing someone else. What on earth will this prove? How on earth will it help? First of all, it will loosen you up. You’re violently throwing away any of the assignment’s original creative constraints. That’s liberating unto itself, and an important prerequisite. It’s also quite likely that this extreme, over-the-top (again, murder???) concept is making you laugh, making you giddy. It’s like the suppressed laughter you had in school when you drew a funny picture of the teacher, not ten feet away. But here’s the thing: Like it or not, there will be a method to your madness. You just needed to uncork it. “Murder” in this case, can be figurative. It might be that this new software can slay the competition. Maybe it’s a novel depiction of a “killer app.” See how ridiculously easy it is to dial back the original, wholly inappropriate concept to something very useful? And it only took a minute. We mention the “method to your madness” above because, try as you may, you’ll still be on-topic, even when you try to be your craziest. You can’t un-think the original assignment as you brainstorm insane iterations for it. So you’re really just tricking your own sense of propriety into letting go. Now imagine, as part of the tried-and-true brainstorming process, you follow the first rule (by the way, we have a nice article on “The V-8 trick” and other brainstorming techniques) of “going for volume.” Imagine that you have lots of these insane, ridiculous, over-the-top ideas. It’s an embarrassment of riches. Because you can dial any of them back. An exception to the rule As we’d noted above, most assignments ask you for vanilla in the first place. But some don’t. For those—the jalapeños—it’s not just appropriate, but expected that you go over-the-top in your interpretation and execution (glaring fonts and neon colors, anyone?). So then you’re set from the get-go. These kinds of extreme assignments often ask for parody, or shock value, or brash humor. All of that works here. But again—go big. Go huge. Go over the top. Challenge yourself to out-extreme the extreme assignment. Again, you can always dial it back, easily. The opposite (cranking up something bland) is impossible. This trick is more useful than you think We’ve couched this entire article within the context of solving a creative assignment. But it’s so much more useful than that. We use extreme examples all the time. When a client asks us whether Option A for a certain business challenge might work better—or worse—than Option B, we dive straight for the “Extreme Knob,” and crank it. What would Option A look like, pushed to its ridiculous, over-the-top extreme? What would Option B look like, pushed just as much? We imagine, and describe these, for the client. Clearly, one of these will be closer to what the client wants than the other. We point that out to them; it’s instantly crystal clear; and within the context of that very conversation, we’re able to easily dial back the extreme scenarios, and help the client to pick the better of the two options. All this falls under the challenge of creative problem-solving. Which is what we do every day. Contact us now and let us help you, too.
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