Ideation: how can you come up with great ideas quickly

Ideation is an activity that every person engages in almost every day without even realising it. When you’re weighing the options of what to have for dinner or considering which route will get you home quicker, you’re ideating. Cool, right?

Ideation is a stage of the Design Thinking process. The goal of the ideation process is to generate as many ideas as possible, to find new solutions to a problem. There are a number of ideation techniques and tools that you can use in an ideation workshop.

But first things first. You need to start with a problem.

Problems before solutions

First things first, you can’t start solving a problem until you have clearly defined it. If you haven’t worked out your problem statement, and written it down, then that’s a good place to start.

Ideation is where you start matching the insights you have gathered from your customers to the problem you are trying to solve. It is usually a good idea to review your problem statement and your assumption map to make sure that you have gathered the right data and that the problem you started with is still relevant. Maybe it needs a bit of a re-write: that’s a good thing! All of the tools we use are living documents so changing them doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means that you’re really listening to your customers and working towards a solution they actually want.

Don’t overthink it (because you definitely will)

If you’re a user of Netflix (or some other streaming platform) you’ll be familiar with the concept of analysis paralysis. This is a common human reaction where we feel a profound need to make the ‘right’ decision. We will spend hours scrolling through the many titles we could watch only to end up re-watching the same show we just finished re-watching last week. Sound familiar? If this is an issue for something as trivial as our evening entertainment then it is no surprise that we struggle to solve big issues that have real consequences for real people.

An exercise that we use to overcome this is one we like to call a “how might we?” This involves getting a wall, a sharpie and a bunch of post-it notes. The team then starts posing questions that begin with the phrase “how might we?” Making these ideas into questions prevents the exercise from becoming biased towards one solution. In fact, these ideas aren’t solutions at all – really they are just reworded problems with a great focus on what matters to your future users.

Converge, diverge, converge

Once everything is on the wall, some pretty clear themes will emerge. What those themes are will depend entirely on your project but there is always some overlap in the questions that people have come up with. The beauty of post-it notes is that you can now move and group the questions by theme to narrow your focus on the areas that matter the most.

This grouping is the first point of convergence. It makes sure that everyone on the team is contributing to the discussion and creates a shared understanding of what really matters.

Next, we get the team to diverge and do a bit of independent thinking. Each person takes the key focus areas that have come to the surface and sketches out a solution that addresses the parts they feel are most crucial. This should be a short exercise and focus at the highest level; an app that provides information to those in a bad situation, or a mobile drop-in centre or a public education campaign.

Once everyone has made a solution on their own, the team comes together and presents what they have come up with. The team can then vote and decide on the direction they want to take. It might be that there is a common thought from everyone, or perhaps the decision is to combine two of the solutions. Either way, the result is a solution that everyone has had a hand in creating. The team converges on one idea which is crucial when it comes time to bring their ideas to life.