5 Tips in Running a Successful Ideation Session

Prior to jumping into ideation, establish ground rules with your team. Here are a few non-negotiables.

1. Timebox - Generally the session should go for between 15-25 minutes. Set a timer!
2. Stand up - Creativity flows when there is energy within the group, so make sure you are out of your seats during the session.
3. One idea per post-it note - Have plenty of post-it notes so that each team member can capture ideas during the session.
4. Be visual - It’s often easier and better to show instead of tell. Draw your ideas where it makes sense to do so. Stick figures and sketches can sometimes say more than many words can.

There should only be one conversation happening at a time. It is easy to get sidetracked during an ideation session and for multiple conversations to occur at the same time. Each person in the session should wait their turn to share and make sure the whole group is listening when they do. Check out this video of a successful ideation session by the IDEO Toy Lab. The team at IDEO generates ideas for bath toys in the video and the team does a fantastic job at maintaining focus during the session while coming up with some pretty epic ideas.

How on earth are we going to come up with ideas in such a short period of time?

Team members new to ideation will doubt that it is possible to come up with a few let alone a lot of ideas during the session. Without a target you won’t know what to aim at. Setting an ambitious target will galvanise the team. For example, if your session is timeboxed for 15 minutes make sure you have a target of at least 30 ideas. The best way to generate a good idea is to come up with lots of ideas.

Remove all the limitations and boundaries that exist at your organisation. Pretend you have a blank canvas - worry about whether the idea will work later down the track. Even if an idea doesn’t seem realistic, it may spark a great idea for someone else.

If for example an idea is progressed and a barrier to implementation is a lack of available budget, then use it as an opportunity to ideate again to think of ideas of how to implement the idea with a smaller budget.

“That’s not possible!”

“That will never work!”

“We tried this before, it didn’t work!”

It is easy to fall into the trap of shutting down ideas when you first hear them. When you hear an idea from a team member, think “and...” rather than “but...” in order to maintain the momentum of the ideation session and to help generate as many ideas as possible.

Bad ideas do exist but they are encouraged as sometimes the bad ideas are the ones that lead to the breakthrough ideas.

If someone came up to you right now and asked you to come up with an idea to solve a problem they had - you would probably struggle to come up with ideas let alone any good ones. This is why ideation is so powerful, as it establishes a way to create focus and spark these ideas.