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Grandomastery Random ANTI-STARTUP Activity – Absurd Pitch-Deck Karaoke for C1–C2+ Satirical Mastery

The most gleefully subversive Grandomastery experience: you receive 12 completely random, unrelated slides (charts, memes, stock photos, diagrams). Your mission – in true PowerPoint karaoke style – is to instantly reorder them into a convincing pitch deck for a deliberately terrible, counter-productive “anti-startup” inspired by the Japanese art of Chindōgu (brilliantly useless inventions). The product must appear superficially brilliant yet be catastrophically impractical, and your deadpan delivery has to sell it to imaginary investors as the next unicorn.

Example: a company that sells self-heating ice cubes, backed by a “market analysis” slide of a crying penguin and a revenue chart shaped like a melting iceberg.


Target Audience

  • C1–C2–C2+ business English learners & native speakers

  • Startup satirists, corporate trainers, comedy writers, presentation coaches

  • Perfect for BEC Higher, C2 Proficiency Speaking Part 2/3, and team-building gone wrong


Mode & Duration

Solo or battle-mode spoken pitch with screen – 30–45 minutes per round


Key Skills Developed (True C2+ Level)

  • Masterful satirical storytelling & narrative transportation – turning nonsense into a compelling anti-success story

  • Advanced/proficient corporate English with layered irony – flawless investor-speak delivered completely straight-faced

  • Structural improvisation & emergent coherence – creating logical flow from pure chaos in real time

  • Chindōgu-style absurd innovation – designing “unuseless” products that expose the ridiculousness of solutionism

  • Cognitive flexibility & reverse thinking – deliberately making things worse while sounding visionary

  • Deadpan performative sprezzatura – maintaining executive gravitas while pitching catastrophic ideas

  • Meta-critique of startup culture – subtle parody of traction metrics, hockey-stick graphs, and founder myths


Core Theoretical Principles This Activity Is Built On

  1. Chindōgu (Kenji Kawakami) – the art of inventing objects that are seemingly useful yet gloriously impractical, training absurd-yet-insightful thinking

  2. Verfremdungseffekt / Alienation Effect (Brecht) – preventing passive acceptance by making the familiar (startup pitches) deliberately strange and laughable

  3. Oblique Strategies + Battledecks tradition – random visual constraints as the fastest path to original, unfiltered presentation brilliance


Used by top innovation labs, comedy clubs, and C2 examiners as the ultimate antidote to cliché business English and the fastest route to razor-sharp satirical fluency.




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