Team Disguising Technique

Give creative teams different contexts to unlock unexpected ideas

David Placek
Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe)

Team Disguising Technique

"One team knows everything about the project but the other teams don't. If we're working for Microsoft, the second team thinks they're working for Apple... And then the third team, we take it out of computers, and they might be naming a bicycle." - David Placek

What It Is

The Team Disguising Technique is a creative process innovation developed by Lexicon Branding: instead of having all naming teams work on the actual brief, deliberately give different teams disguised or completely different assignments. Most of Lexicon's best names have come from the teams that didn't know what they were really working on.

This counterintuitive approach addresses a fundamental creative problem: knowing the real constraints and expectations actually limits creative output. Freedom to "make mistakes" produces more innovative ideas.

How It Works

The Structure

For significant projects, use three teams of two people each:

Team 1: Full Context

  • Knows everything about the actual project
  • Works with real constraints and requirements
  • Produces expected, sensible solutions

Team 2: Competitor Context

  • Told they're working for a competitor (e.g., Apple instead of Microsoft)
  • Same underlying challenge, different imagined brand
  • Freed from preconceptions about what "we" would do

Team 3: Category Shift

  • Completely different industry (e.g., naming a bicycle instead of software)
  • Abstract challenge: capture the feeling, not the function
  • Maximum creative freedom

Why It Works

  • Teams know the assignment is disguised - there's no deception
  • But knowing you're "not really working on this" removes pressure
  • Permission to make mistakes opens creative possibilities
  • Synchronicity occurs: unrelated contexts produce surprisingly relevant ideas

The Windsurf Example

Codium needed a name for their AI coding assistant. The product was about creating "flow" in coding - something intangible and technical.

One team was given: "List everything that communicates dynamics, movement, flow - in sports, real words, metaphors."

From that exploration emerged "Windsurf" - a word that was always available but wouldn't have surfaced from a team focused on "name an AI IDE."

How to Apply It

  1. Set up multiple small teams (2-3 people each)

    • Avoid large brainstorming groups
    • Small teams produce better results than committees

  2. Craft three different briefs:

    • Brief A: The actual project with full context
    • Brief B: Same challenge, different company (competitor or adjacent)
    • Brief C: Same feeling/experience, completely different industry

  3. Be transparent about the disguise

    • Teams know they're working on a modified brief
    • The goal is creative freedom, not deception

  4. Don't overevaluate early

    • Generate 1,500-3,000 ideas/directions across teams
    • Suspend judgment during generation
    • Most won't work - that's expected

  5. Cross-pollinate results

    • Review output from all teams together
    • Ideas from disguised teams often spark solutions
    • Connect dots between unrelated explorations

When to Use It

  • When naming something intangible (software, services, abstract products)
  • When your team keeps producing predictable, safe options
  • When you need to break out of industry conventions
  • When brainstorming has stalled on the "obvious" direction
  • When you want to find truly distinctive names

Source

  • Guest: David Placek
  • Episode: "Building a culture of excellence"
  • Key Discussion: (00:22:41-00:23:29) - Explanation of the disguised team structure
  • Additional: (00:33:00-00:35:16) - The Windsurf/Codium example showing how the technique produced the winning name
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube

Related Frameworks

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