Dean Woolley, creative director of healthcare agency Woolley Pau, part of the GyroHSR network.

Trying to do the right thing inevitably leads to solutions which have already been tried. That s what happens when we use a frame of reference based on the past . Instead , we should ask what s the wrong thing to do? The answers might lead to interesting new solutions .

Lets say our brand is a contraceptive, whats the most ridiculous thing we can think up?

What about marketing it to nuns?

Well, thats obviously an outrageous idea; sales would disappear and wed be fired. But think about it for a moment. What if we were able to obtain the backing of an entire convent of nuns? we nuns dont need contraception, but if we did wed choose this brand.. Hows that for an endorsement of product efficacy and safety?

Still a bit scary?

Okay, why not take a cohort of young women using your brand and compare them with a cohort of nuns and show the birth rate is the same.Thats interesting.

Or, thinking of nuns, why not reprise The Sound of Music, this time with only two Von Trapp children. We could then do the same for The Waltons, The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, Queen Victoria or any famously large family. There. Weve gone from nuns to a campaignable family planning idea in just three steps.

Making a mistake made us think. Its a versatile technique. A friend who writes for television often gets writers block. At these times he says he hates to sit and stare at the blank page. So instead he writes something completely absurd like and suddenly a giant sausage fell from the sky. The giant sausage may not make it into the final script, but dealing with the wrong idea gets him thinking in a much more productive way than simply waiting around for the right idea.

It works because it defies logic. Whenever we follow a line of logic in creative thinking whether its writing TV scripts or ads we are led along the same path as everyone else with a similar brief. Thats why advertising within categories tends to look the same.

Car ads are shot on the same open roads and healthcare ads show the same happy, smiley models because the people behind them have all tried their best to do the right thing.By willfully attempting to do the wrong thing we instantly erase the line of logic, forcing ourselves to follow a different path. The end result must of course answer the brief and serve the brand; there must be a logical argument for the idea. But isnt it much better to post-rationalise an inspired idea than to pre-rationalise our way to a bland one?