Problem definition
Paraphrasing Key Words
Overview
Paraphrasing Key Words is a simple technique in which key words in a sentence are substituted with other with similar meaning, one at a time, to evolve the meaning of sentences that describe a current problem or possible solutions. Doing this can guide participants to discover new assumptions about a problem and to generate alternative perceptions of it.
What to do
The technique can be applied in the following 4 basic steps:
- Write down your initial statement of the current problem or the emerging solution concept;
- Underline the key words in this statement – normally some of the nouns and verbs, but also sometimes the adjectives and adverbs;
- Use a thesaurus or online dictionary to find synonyms – words with similar meanings to each of the underlined keywords – in order to generate a set of words to replace each keyword;
- Change one keyword at a time in the initial statement with one or more synonyms uncovered in the previous step, in order to slowly change the problem statement, or to trigger different streams of ideas about possible solutions. Over time, the initial statement evolves into a different statement with different possible meanings that can give rise to new insights and ideas.
- In addition, one variation of the technique is to takes just 2 key words from the initial statement (ideally a grammatically linked pair such as noun-verb, verb-noun, verb-adverb, adjective-noun), generates lists of synonyms for each word, then uses word pairs generated from the 2 synonym lists to stimulate ideas.
People
This technique can be used alone or with any number of people, but it will probably be less effective with larger groups of people.
Problem solving characteristics
The technique is probably more effective for incremental creative thinking in which you want to evolve your understanding of the problem statement or to develop some new ideas about an evolving problem concept. It can also yield more transformative ideas, but we feel that this is less likely.
Creative phases
This technique can be used to understand and define the original problem more effectively, or to evolve additional new ideas from an already developed solution concept that can already be described in a coherent way.
Location
This technique can be used anywhere that affords access to a thesaurus of some form.
Equipment
Use paper and pens, preferably of different colours, if the technique is going to be used in paper form. Of course, the technique can be used digitally, documenting the initial problem statement in a Word document or PowerPoint Slide, and replacing words directly using the edit feature. The other key piece of equipment is a thesaurus or an online lexicon. If you have Internet access, consider using online tools such as
WordNet.