Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill every board, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Fieldnote, week 9. Bookings are flat and the team keeps redesigning the same job form. Ana runs Alternative Worlds with 5 people to break the loop before the next sprint.
What the team took away
Two steals went to the next sprint: a voice note that drafts the report, and photo first with fields filled behind it. The team stopped redesigning the form and started removing it.
How to run it
Preparation
Pick the problem before the room fills, in one narrow sentence. "Get a technician to log their first intervention" works. "Improve onboarding" does not.
Choose the worlds yourself, do not crowdsource them live. Four is enough: a brand the team admires, a rival with nothing to lose, a world far from your industry, and one that is frankly absurd.
Write each world at the top of its column beforehand, with one line on what that world is famous for. That line is what makes the borrowing possible.
Say out loud that feasibility is off the table for the next hour. People who refuse workshops usually refuse being judged, not being creative.
Agenda
5 min
The problem, once You read the sentence, you do not explain it. Any clarification comes from a question, not from a speech.
10 min
Our world today Everyone writes what we would do with our current reflexes. Getting the obvious out early is what frees the rest of the hour.
30 min
Three foreign worlds Ten minutes per world, alone then shared. The prompt is always the same: how would they solve this, with their means and their nerve?
10 min
Worth stealing Each person picks one idea from a world that is not ours and writes what would have to be true for us to do it.
5 min
Back to our world You keep three, you name an owner for each, and you stop. Sorting them is another workshop.
Pitfalls
Do not let the group argue feasibility inside a world. The question is what that world would do, not whether we could.
A world nobody in the room knows produces nothing. Drop it live and take another one, it costs thirty seconds.
If a world only yields variants of what you already do, it sits too close to yours. Go further out, the absurd column exists for that.
Ending on the foreign ideas leaves the group amused and empty-handed. The "worth stealing" column is the one that makes the session count.
Afterwards
The kept ideas go into a convergence: Dot voting if there are many, How might we if they are still too vague to build on. Nothing here is a decision yet.