Role-Storming

Ordinary brainstorming stalls in two ways that have nothing to do with how much the room knows: people self-edit the odd idea because it would be theirs to own, and everyone stays trapped in the same default associations. Role-storming attacks both at once by changing WHO is generating. Instead of producing ideas as yourself, you adopt a specific assumed identity - "an eccentric inventor," "a curious ten-year-old," "a street artist," "a rival founder" - and generate the ideas you imagine that persona would offer. The durable cognitive move, stripped of the slogan, is: generate divergent ideas while inhabiting a chosen non-self identity, using that identity as both an inhibition-lowering shield (the idea is the persona's, not yours - ownership distance) and a distancing lens (the persona's standpoint pulls you off your default associations - standpoint distance). The artifact is a persona-tagged idea list: candidate ideas attributed to each adopted role, so the distancing is auditable and the pile is ready for a downstream convergence step. This is a generation engine, not the fixed functional-lens evaluation the perspective family otherwise runs.

When to Use

• Idea flow is being throttled by self-consciousness rather than a shortage of knowledge - the room where two confident voices set the frame and everyone else self-edits, or where the participants' "serious" identity makes a playful or extreme idea feel unsafe to voice.
• The thinking is fixated on one frame and a deliberately foreign standpoint ("how would a regulator / a child / a street artist see this?") could break the fixation and surface candidates the default frame will not reach.
• You want more and stranger candidates at the divergent stage, with a downstream convergence step to follow - role-storming only widens the pool, it does not pick.
• A timid but possibly valuable idea needs a deniable owner so it can be said aloud at all.

When NOT to Use

• You actually need a balanced appraisal of a decision, not more ideas. Generating "as the customer" is not the same as evaluating a choice through the customer's interests. If the job is a multi-mode, convergent judgment of one option, route to think-parallel-perspectives-review (fixed functional lenses - facts, upside, risk, intuition, alternatives - over a single decision, producing a synthesis). Role-storming gives a creative pile, not a verdict.
• You need genuine challenge, not role-played opposition. A persona arguing against the plan is a costume, and role-played dissent underperforms authentic dissent and can even harden the original view. If the goal is real challenge, route to think-authentic-dissent, which engineers for genuine minority dissent rather than impersonated objection.
• The natural persona for the task is an inhibited or narrowing one. This is the method's sharpest, evidence-backed failure mode - the one controlled adjacent result shows the effect FLIPS NEGATIVE with a rigid persona (an "eccentric poet" raised originality, a "rigid librarian" lowered it below baseline). Do not role-storm "as a cautious auditor" or "a risk-averse executive" to get ideas. Mandate an uninhibited or deliberately-foreign persona; forbid inhibited ones.
• You want structured generation by other machinery. If the move is to negate a foundational premise, use think-assumption-reversal; to apply seven transformations to a seed, use think-scamper; to transfer deep structure from a distant domain, use think-far-analogy-ideation; to run silent parallel written generation, use think-brainwriting. Role-storming's engine is identity-adoption specifically; reach for it only when the lever you want is who is generating.
• The exercise is collapsing into caricature. When "the angry customer just complains" and the impersonation becomes the point, you are producing theatrical noise (and risk importing crude stereotypes), not ideas. The value is the distancing, not the performance.