project mayhem

first, i have a great mom and though i have wished her happy mother’s day personally i thought i would also do so on my blog. happy mother’s day mom.

secondly, i thought i would introduce y’all to “project mayhem.” due to finals and the beginning of summer the tapestry launch team will not meet for the next month. since, we’re going to be separate for the next month i thought it would be fun to have a project for all of us to work on. thus “project mayhem” was born.

it came out of the book i am presently reading, a whack on the side of the head. it’s a book on creativity and it is wonderful. one of the things it pushes is overcoming the practical. it tells a few stories of creative products that came out of completely impractical original ideas. here are a couple of them:

  • in a brain storming session on how to improve the additives within dog food one person suggested placing indigestible items within the dog food that would produce certain desired effects. two suggested examples were grass seed and florescent dye. the grass seed would sprout from the poop and the florescent dye would glow in the dark enable people to avoid the spot when walking in the dark. not practical ideas for dog food but great ideas for livestock and wildlife. the ideas were put into action in some cattle food to encourage reseeding of the grazing land and into wildlife salt licks for help in tracking the animals. not bad for an unpractical idea.
  • a town was dealing with a major trash problem. they brainstormed ideas for getting people to put their trash in a garbage can. they suggested increasing fines, hiring more police, and other ideas that punished people for not placing their waste in a trash can. finally, one person suggested creating garbage cans that would pay people to put trash into them. a completely impractical idea. the city would of course go broke if they gave people money for putting trash in a garbage can. yet they took the idea of a reward and created joke telling trash cans. every time you put trash in the garbage can it told a different joke and since the jokes were changed every two weeks people were encouraged to continue doing. not a bad idea for something that was originally completely impractical.

so “project mayhem” is about completely impractical ideas. for the next month the launch team is going to pray and think about the most amazing and impractical ideas that tapestry can do or be a part of. via the wonder of google docs we will also discuss the ideas. the only rule is that for the next month nobody is allowed to point out why an idea will not work. instead, we will discuss what positive about an idea and how it might “cross pollinate” into other more-practical ideas. hopefully it will be a means for pushing on the walls of the box a little bit.

One Reply to “project mayhem”

  1. We used to do something similar with the sales force. I called it hichhiking. We would sit around a table and through ideas out, then hichkike on the ideas. everyone would add to it. Sometimes it got funny, but sometimes great Ideas came from it. We allowed no negitives, just a lot of somewhat dumb ideas. The monthl warehouse cookout came from one session. We invited all our customers and the 2 highest volumn salesmen greeted and chatted with customers, while the 2 lowest volumn salesmen cooked, served and cleaned up. It was a great incentive. Customers loved picking ont their salesmen.

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