The other day I got one of my business clients to brainstorm how she and her staff could improve their small business. This is a process that I encourage my long term clients to do at least once a year.

The method I coached them in uses reversals to create insights about their company: the reversals help you to see problems from a new perspective and to encourage you to raise sensitive issues that you are usually too polite to mention.

What are the typical reversal questions?

There are five questions that I typically ask at some time on our two hour session:

1. How can you make things much worse? Look at making your existing situation worse. When you have enough ideas, reverse them to identify potential improvements.

2. How can you make yourself less useful? Find ways to waste time and resources. Exploring effectiveness in this different way shows you hidden possibilities for damaging your process, so you invert them to find improvements.

3. How can you add complications so that everything grinds to a halt? Brainstorm all the ways to make your paperwork and decision-making worse many of them come naturally! What a relief it is to accelerate your business instead.

4. How can you really foul things up? For instance your team managers should make immediate decisions without current information... Reversing this and other ideas might lead to realistic decisions that involve your team.

5. How can you make your customers hate you? Could you make customers wait longer, avoid answering telephones, send incorrect bills, change deliveries at short notice, complicate bills and send junk mail? Just ask those doing the job (not their managers) to can tell you how to get it right. This might lead to you delighting your customers instead.

Have fun being wacky

It is great to let humour emerge in this process, as you look for the wildest and most exotic ideas you can. As you get your brain thinking creatively, you will often find that crazy ideas often contain innovative solutions.

Since much behaviour consists of opposites, I feel there is profit in looking at what you do not want in order to achieve what you do want.

In summary, learn to see things backwards, inside out, and upside down and you will see more.

Adrian Pepper

Adrian Pepper specialises in working with the owners and directors of small businesses as they improve their performance and grow their income.

Choosing to work with entrepreneurs who are committed to growing their companies, Adrian offers rich experience drawn from a 30-year career in middle and senior management in blue chip companies, an MBA, an engineering degree and an OCN Advanced Certificate in Coaching.

Adrian has lived and worked in Deal, Kent since 1991, building up a broad network in the business community. He writes a column in the KM Kentish Gazette and other newspapers on subjects that interest the sort of people who start and grow small businesses. He also publishes a podcast twice a month to help small businesses to grow. Rrecently this has grown into speaking engagements and team training for business seminars.