Ban-and-Replace

Write down the obvious answers, ban them for five minutes, and force a new candidate by changing multiple slots at once.

Your book club has planned its tenth anniversary gathering, and everyone's suggestions are the same three ideas wearing different outfits: dinner at a restaurant, a potluck at someone's house, or drinks at the usual bar. The brainstorm has been open a week and the group chat is circling.

Ban-and-Replace forces novelty by removing the gravitational pull of the obvious. Its recipe, straight from the spec: write down the three obvious answers, ban them for five minutes, and during the ban generate one candidate by changing several option slots at once, specifically actor, mechanism, timing, scale, and rule. Then restore the originals to the list so nothing is lost. Applied here: with dinner, potluck, and bar off-limits, you must change who organizes (each member owns one hour), the mechanism (an activity, not a meal), the timing (a Saturday morning), the scale (a full-day outing), and a rule (phones in a basket). Out comes something like a morning hike ending at the bookstore where the club began. The visible change is one genuinely new candidate competing against the incumbents rather than a longer list of clones. Skip the ritual when an obvious answer is plainly right and the stakes are low; five minutes of forced cleverness is not free.