The Alphabet of Chaos: An Arts-Based Exercise to Experience Creativity Under Constraints

Brainstorming is widely taught in management education, yet students often underestimate how constraint calibration, emotions, and group dynamics shape which ideas get generated, selected, and retained. Alphabet of Chaos is a 90-minute arts-based classroom workshop in which students create 4-5 visual variants of a randomly assigned letter under shared constraints, then converge through peer selection to build a collective chaotic alphabet – an analog to an idea wall – used as an artifact for a structured product-process-person debrief. Students leave able to generate multiple ideas, analyze how constraints and group dynamics shape brainstorming outcomes, and articulate their creative inhibitions and confidence.