Who this is for
Three groups — and one this is not for.
Innovation leaders in organisations
Anyone responsible for a roadmap knows the problem up close: the process runs cleanly, and the results become predictable. Deliberate irritation is not a creativity workshop here — it is a testing mechanism. It exposes which assumptions a venture silently takes for granted, and what happens when one of them falls.
Teaching and research
In teaching, the subject is doubly useful: as a topic — innovation economics beyond the rhetoric of planning — and as a method, because the effect can be produced and discussed within a single seminar session. The theoretical connections range from Campbell’s variation and selection through Kauffman’s adjacent possible to Knight’s distinction between risk and uncertainty.
Consulting and facilitation
Anyone facilitating strategy and innovation workshops needs interventions that move a stuck group without offending it. Dosed irritation is exactly that: a tool for the moment when everyone agrees and nobody is learning anything anymore.
And who it is not for
If you are looking for an idea machine, you are in the wrong place. This is not about producing more ideas — almost every organisation already has too many. It is about the quality of the assumptions on which the existing ideas rest. If you consider your innovation problem a problem of quantity, this approach will disappoint you.