IDEA GENERATION
How the Idea Generation Process can be used for Business Strategy
Introduction
It can be incredibly challenging to create and communicate a strategic direction. This is only the beginning though; you now need to make it real.
You need to take directional concepts that exist as words on a slide deck and evolve them into tasks that the teams can deliver.
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This development of the strategic statement can be described as a series of decisions that create increasingly refined objectives until a specific, measurable project scope can defined. Idea generation sessions can be applied across this process, cascading the results of one session into the objective statements of the next.
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To demonstrate, we will walk through an example based on work we recently completed with a client. The management team stated its intention to improve its Environmental, Social, and Governance credentials. While this does give a general direction, it is too broad to define any specific action.
We used the Idea Generation Process to explore this statement and to develop clear actions.
Adding definition
There are two elements to breaking down this objective statement. The first is relatively easy – there are three focus areas: Environmental, Social, and Governance; these can be separated out into different workstreams.
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Where things get a little more tricky is in defining what “improving the company’s credentials” actually means.
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The first idea generation session will aim to refine this statement by setting the objective statement “Identify the elements that influence the company’s ESG credentials.”
The outcome of this session is likely to raise more questions: identify the stakeholders who are judging your credentials and understand how they measure performance. This would then lead to an action to define what your targeted performance is and then to measure how your current performance compares.
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Setting Objective statements
Once you have these two axes defined, you can build a map of the idea generation sessions that can be planned.
Each of the red circles represents a brainstorming question – “who are the stakeholders for our environmental initiatives” or “what are the metrics for our social initiatives” for example.
Whether you sperate these out as individual follow up sessions or you group them into one larger workshop is a question of time and resource. What is important though, is that you treat each one as a discrete separate question. This will help focus the team and will make the idea generation more effective.
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For the next step, we will look at the Environmental Initiatives column in a little more detail. The responses to a guiding question for the next session such as “who are the stakeholders for environmental initiatives” may include “Investment companies.”
A follow-on that explores how these companies report their ESG investments will then identify the metrics they reference.
This illustrates that your guiding questions must not only be kept discreet from each other, but there is often a dependency between them for information flow; you should be aware of any natural sequence to the sessions.
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Applying filters and prioritisation
Each of these sessions will generate multiple suggestions for follow-up investigation. It is likely that you will not be able to follow up on all of them; you will have resource constraints and will want to define strategic projects in time to actually deliver them.
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At this stage you will test each of your suggestions against your business constraints; these will act as a filter to let through those initiatives that are most likely to succeed. The likelihood for success and your understanding of resource availability for delivery will then form the basis of a prioritisation list for follow up.
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Of course, if you do not know what the most appropriate constraints are for your particular situation, you can pause at this point and run an idea generation session to address this point specifically.
Once you have applied the filtering and prioritisation stages you will have generated a list of guiding statements for subsequent sessions.
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These statements will include a clear objective statement and the evolutions of any constraints to be applied to these sessions. In our example, a percentage of revenue target has been defined within a time and budget constraint.
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The same process is repeated at the next level of strategy definition. In this stage we have taken the broad concept of strategic development and refined it into the three main elements of Product, Market, and Business development. Product Development will look for opportunities in what the company produces, Market Development will consider who the products are being offered to and Business Development will explore the structure of the business or growth opportunities via merger or acquisition.
The guiding questions that were been cascaded from the previous stage can then be mapped across these workstreams to generate the next round of idea sessions.
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In our example, we progressed the idea sessions in the product development stream using the four prioritised guiding questions defined in the previous session. These have then been cascaded into the different product development groups: Product Engineering, Packaging Development, and Production Engineering.
Once the constraints have been applied to the output of this last round of idea generation sessions, we have been able to write scope documents for projects for the teams to deliver. We can give a clear specific objective for the project and provide success metrics.
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An important secondary benefit from following this approach is that you will be able to demonstrate to the team how their project contributes to the success of the business. This will improve their sense that their work is important but will also help frame the project context: as they face decisions within the execution of the project, the team will have a sense of the right direction based on their knowledge of how the project fits in to the business strategic objectives.
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Summary
As you look over the way that these sessions cascade, it is probably becoming clear that if each idea session in the first round generates multiple sessions in the next round, and each session in this round will in turn generate multiple further sessions then the workload associated with this process could soon become unmanageable.
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However, not all the circles will need a full idea session, you may be able to split some off for a quick investigation. Many should be filtered out by the constraints and their numbers will reduce as you apply prioritisation parameters.
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The primary message here, as across all the tools and processes we described across our website, is that you should look at these as guides. You do not have complete every single step and you can change these steps to suit your individual needs. You must however maintain a clear view of what you are trying to achieve, and if you understand the principles behind what you are doing you will be able to make these choices consciously.
