Roam
Hold one thing; let the rest wander.
Ten redraws, one fixed line.
Seen in Raymond Queneau, Exercices de style, 1947
Try it on your work
Choose one feature of the thing you're working on that must survive: a line, a joint, a measurement. Remake the whole thing ten times, keeping only that feature, and never trying to make any version better than the last. Stop at ten. Look for the version that is good by accident.
Keep your project's first sentence fixed. Rewrite everything after it five times, each time in a different direction, with no attempt to improve. Stop at five. One of them has gone somewhere the plan would not have allowed.
Fix one constraint your process must meet: a deadline, a budget, a person. For a month, change any other part of how you work each week, without a goal. Stop at the month and list what changed that you would never have chosen to change.
How it has been used
Most change in evolution may be neutral drift: variations that neither help nor harm, wandering through generations while the one hard requirement, survival, holds. Holding one thing fixed and letting everything else wander is a way of finding what a plan would never propose.
Where it leads
Grouped under Give me another way in