Creative reflection provocations

Notice something you haven't noticed before

Focus on the familiar until it becomes unfamiliar

Zoom in or zoom out

Change your perspective

Observe in reverse

Focus on the background/listen to the noise

Tune into the weak signals

Pay attention to the periphery

Use someone else's perceptions

Misperceive on purpose

Notice what stays the same and what changes

Speed things up / slow things down

Notice the negative space

Change the language

Change the mode (words, symbols, sounds, textures, movements)

Loop through several translations until you get back to the original language

Make up some new words for this

Cultivate synesthesia

Be excessively literal

Over-extend the metaphor

Borrow ways of expressing this from an unrelated domain

Be more precise or be more ambiguous

Use the wrong words

Use different criteria

Compare it to something else / new

Find ways to move it up or down the scale

Compare it to the best and the worst

Use the wrong scale

Find ways to love/hate it

Question what makes something ‘good’ or ‘bad’

Judge it based on what it could become

Flip your initial assessment and defend it

Apply criteria from an unrelated field

Consider its value in a different time or place

Find something that makes it different from everything else

Find something that unites it to everything else

Create more / fewer categories

Move the category boundaries

Put it in the opposite category and make it fit

Find something else that it is similar / different to

Find its opposite's opposites

Group based on emotion rather than logic

Create arbitrary group and find meaning in them

Identify patterns within the exceptions

Combine incompatible categories somehow

Find hidden subcategories within existing ones

Group by what's missing not what’s present

Make different connections

Find unfamiliar / weak / hidden patterns

Obsess about coincidences

Ignore obvious coincidences

Keep asking, ‘What if…?’

Connect seemingly unrelated elements by force

Look for patterns across different scales

Seek correlations across different time periods

Find relationships between opposites

Map connections that shouldn't exist but could

Reverse existing correlations

Assume reverse causality (reverse time)

Come up with several different explanations

Find hidden causes

Keep asking, ‘But why did that happen?’

Keep asking, ‘So what?’

Push ideas to their logical extremes

Consider ripple effects in unusual directions

Imagine the impossible becoming possible

Find alternative routes to get to here

Assume whatever could go wrong will go wrong

Extrapolate based on the least likely scenario

Ask ‘What would happen if this never stopped?’