Creating Ideas that matter

When you achieve a state of flow you lose track of time, you forget all your physical needs, and even loose feelings of self-consciousness. That is exactly how one should feel when they are all in an ideation session — brainstorming their ideas away. Even the most formidable ideators out there feel challenged sometimes by the most common of inhibitions. Let us see a list of what they are and then see how to beat them.

#1 This idea won’t work: When we begin with no expertise in a field it is easier to try (new) things because we have a learning curve and buffer of unfamiliarity towards the subject matter. So we tend to try and fail before we perfect something. There are avenues for exploration, possibility and experimentation. With time and expertise, we lose the mindset to try new and untested ideas.

How to overcome it?

Turn ideas in a hypothesis that can be tested. A hypothesis is open to two possibilities — one it can be right, is true or it works and other it is wrong, not true or it doesn’t work. It also opens up to action — because a hypothesis cannot be validated or invalidated without actually being tested in real time. So the only way is to get out there and test it out, especially in the problem-solving space, where things get real and ideas naturally weeded out.

#2: The Blah Blah Blah effect: So many times you would walk out of strategy meetings and ideation session exhausted. Everyone was saying something, there was so much unstructured that you can’t seem to remember why you called this ideation for in this first place. Mostly occurs when the core theme or agenda for ideation is not set and there is no moderator to facilitate the discussion. Also, there are some very dominating voices or voices of authority that hinders the free flow of ideas.

How to overcome it?

Shall we not have bosses and bossy people in the ideation, please? Well, that seems unlikely. So the next best option is to leverage the power of brain writing and how might we statements. Create the problem or opportunity statement with the power of ‘How might we…?” so that it gets the topic in the discussion really clearly to the participants. For instance, how might we reduce the time customers are spending in our check out kiosks? Or how might we engage our customers when they wait for service? — Next is to move to brainwriting — I specifically like the 6–3–5 technique. There is a moderator, and the rest of the folks divide into teams of 6. Every team has 6 participants and they each write 3 ideas in 5 minutes. Then in a round robin fashion share their idea with one another. You can cluster similar idea together and together there are at best 18 unique ideas. Especially powerful when there are shy ones on the team.

#3: The self-doubt: When we are kids we are never afraid to ask questions, be curious, create bizarre things, make things up with our imagination, and come up with silly ideas, to make a fool of ourselves or even fail. But somehow when we grow up we become the first person to judge our own idea. One end is the overconfidence that my idea is the only viable idea and on the other extreme is to think our idea is silly and won’t work. We have already imagined that people are going to laugh at our idea, think we are crazy or the idea is absurd.

How to overcome it?

Imagine you started the ideation with bad ideas. Ideas that people deliberately think won’t work or is silly. It is like an icebreaker and sometime you would be surprised that great ideas are triggered by this bad idea session. It sort of loosens people up and opens up their mind to this it is okay to think weird and crazy. We can take inspiration from, a Japanese practice called Chindōgu where people get together to invent seemingly great solution (or gadgets) to solve everyday problems but are nothing but useless or weird to become a daily used product.

#4: Where is the box: Ideation sessions have an uncanny way of getting off the track. But that is good to have a little bit of outside the box thinking. It is hard though when we have set a clear topic for ideation, our spotlight is tuned to solving the problem — and we set our contexts too narrow. The first and top ideas if you see are usually from things that we have seen, things that we know, and things we can make senses off. That means if you can think of those ideas, someone else can think of them too. It is not bad to copy ideas by the way, as far as it effectively solves the problem we are trying to solve. I am flummoxed when leaders say that they want people to think outside the box while sitting inside it. Even when boundaries help to keep us on track and in focus, it suffocates creativity and fresh perspectives.

How to overcome it?

There is this super amazing tool called reversing assumptions. In any boxed environment, there are a set of givens. Those are the things we assume should, and will always be part of the ecosystem. For instance, when we take a school, we think that teachers, students, schools, classrooms, curriculum are non-negotiables. What if you reversed any of these assumptions? What if we don’t have students — who else will we teach? Possibly we can teach employees, the elderly, or even machines.

#5: Even best ideas fail: You will notice this phenomenon with both startup owners and big corporate leaders and executive. We all want our idea to be the best idea. In fact, we all tend to fall in love with our ideas, and once we do that it is very hard to distance ourselves from it. When someone says something about our idea, it is an ego hit, our defence systems go up on alarm. At times I have seen absolutely irrational debates over ideas — sometimes ideas that eventually don’t work or fail altogether.

How to overcome it?

Sounds counter-intuitive, but the idea is to have a lot of ideas. Imagine you had one child, vs when you have many children — your children have to share the love you have. Of course not to fall for my analogy, our ideas are not our children. They are just a way of getting us to solve a problem or a challenge. Shift focus from ideas to the problem or to the people. For who or what did we come up with this idea in the first place? If it doesn’t help them then why are we still running with it?

These have absolutely worked for me and I highly recommend these techniques — but you don’t have to take my word for it, please do give it a try. What have you faced during ideations and how did you overcome it.

In Summary,

Related posts:

With the rise of technology like self-driving cars and drones, it’s obvious that we’ve entered a stage of rapidly developing autonomous navigation. Current systems are remarkably reliable in their…

existe um monstro sem nome. O monstro não pode suportar não ter um nome. O monstro sai numa jornada a fim de encontrar um nome para si. O monstro divide-se em dois pois o mundo é grande demais, um…

Frame the moments that really matter – better! Here’s how to get your best-ever family photos