The Pitch Pit

Each team draws a random object and a random audience — 'a stepladder, for cats' — and has twenty-five minutes to build and pitch a business around it. It is a creativity exercise disguised as a joke, and teams produce better thinking here than in most real brainstorms because nothing is at stake.

What it is good for

• Creative thinkingGenerating options before judging them, and building on other people's ideas.
• CollaborationWorking a shared problem where no one person holds all the information.
• Pure funNo learning objective. Sometimes that is the correct answer.
• CommunicationPractising clear hand-offs, active listening and saying the hard thing early.

What you need

• Two bowls of slips: random objects and random audiences
• Flip chart paper or a slide each

The run sheet

1. Prepare the two bowls (prep)

   Twenty mundane objects, twenty specific audiences. Specific is funnier and more generative than absurd: 'commuting cellists' beats 'aliens' every time.

2. Draw and brief (5 min)

   Teams of four or five draw one from each bowl. Required: a name, the problem it solves, one feature, one reason it will fail, and a ninety-second pitch.

3. Build (25 min)

   Facilitator circulates and does exactly one thing: when a team is arguing about whether the idea is good, remind them that it is not and to keep going.

4. Pitches (20 min)

   Ninety seconds each, hard stop. Audience applauds. No heckling — teams self-censor if the room is hostile.

5. Award odd categories (10 min)

   Most likely to get funded, most likely to be banned, best name, the one we would actually buy. Everyone wins something, which is the point.

Facilitator notes

• The 'one reason it will fail' requirement is what makes this better than a normal brainstorm. It gives permission to be critical without killing the idea.
• Keep the pitch limit at ninety seconds and enforce it visibly. The constraint produces the quality.
• Good warm-up before a real ideation session — it clears out the urge to be clever before the stakes arrive.

Debrief questions

Ask these immediately afterwards, not next week. Fifteen minutes of these is what turns the activity into something the team refers back to — see the debrief guide.

1. What did your team do when the first idea did not work?
2. Did anyone's throwaway idea turn out to be almost good? What made it almost good?
3. How is this different from how we normally run an idea session?

Variations