So rather than follow our intuition, we go to an opposite extreme, scoring the ideas we generate against a number of criteria to determine what kind of impact they might have on our client’s aspirations and how easy they will be to do.

For the cover assignment, this meant mapping potential collaborators against these two criteria:
1. The impact we thought each designer could have on STEP’s aspirations and desired results (the vertical axis in the grid below).
2. Our perception of each designer’s willingness to engage in the think wrong experiment (the horizontal axis).

Thinking wrong is not a freewheeling exercise that ignores economic or practical reality for the sake of creative edginess. More focused than brainstorming, thinking wrong yields solutions that are directly linked to what our clients must do to create value for their customers and constituents.

More technique than packaged process, thinking wrong takes an intimate look at how we think and how we apply that thinking to solve problems, step by step—to exchange comfortable routine for something that works better.

In this sense, you’ve got a head start on the CEOs at Davos. While they’re making innovation and creativity into a “best practice”—a methodology to bolster their operations —you’ll already be coming up with breakthrough solutions for their problems.

As long as innovation, creativity, and design are considered a sideshow, the best solutions will continue to elude the corporate genius. Because the best solutions don’t come from business as usual and they don’t live in the status quo.