Inner Child Conference

Origin. Transactional analysis / inner-child work in psychotherapy, repurposed as an ideation stance.

Mechanism. Removes the acquired filters — plausibility, professionalism, prior art — by adopting a stance that never had them. The output is not childlike ideas; it is adult ideas with the pre-censorship stage removed.

Procedure. Pose the problem as it would be posed to a curious eight-year-old. Answer without qualification. Ask the obvious question that everyone in the room knows better than to ask. Record the answers before evaluating any of them.

Applies to. Domains with heavy expert acculturation, where the practitioners' fluency is doing the filtering.

Limitations. Not a therapeutic technique here and should not be used as one. As an ideation move it produces mostly noise; its yield is a small number of naïve questions that turn out to have no good answer.