IDEA GENERATION
Effective problem solving and creative thinking
Introduction
Ideas are surprisingly difficult to have. More specifically, it is difficult to have ideas that are relevant to your goal and that you can convert into actions.
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You may be exploring strategic growth; maybe you’ve worked through our articles on how to look for opportunities in product development or market development. You may be trying to address challenges such as cost reduction or quality improvements.
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Specific solutions within business functions are generated every day: individuals and teams with specialist knowledge of their domains solving most of the problems they face. Every so often though, you will need to solve something that exceeds the common knowledge of the teams: you’re trying to change direction and come up with some novel ideas or you have a complex problem to solve. In these cases, you will need to apply idea generation sessions that are extra to the day-to-day work of the teams.
There are three main considerations for these idea generation sessions: the process you follow, the tools you use, and the people that are involved.
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In this article we will describe the idea generation process: how to move from an objective to a list of potential actions for follow up. The objective may be a problem that requires solutions, a problem statement that requires further exploration, or a strategy that requires evolving to business objectives.
We will then describe how this process can be applied beyond stand-alone idea sessions to help evolve the various stages of business strategy.
The Idea Generation process
The goal for the idea generation process is to start from an objective statement and generate a list of potential responses, prioritised for follow-up.
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An effective idea generation session has three stages: creating ideas, combining and refining these ideas, and then prioritising them as actions for follow-up. Each of these stages can be managed as separate events or combined into one complete session, but you must consider which stage of the process you are in to ensure that you are applying the most appropriate tools and measures.
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Idea Creation
Setting an Objective and Direction
In this stage you start with a prompt question or objective statement and work with the team to generate as many responses as possible. You may ask questions like “which problems are our customers trying to solve,” “Where else can we look for applications for our product” or “who can we merge with to extend our capabilities.”
The objective statement will be one of the key influences on the effectiveness of your idea session: it ensures that everyone involved understands what the goal is, acts as the first point of inspiration for the ideas, and will form the context for the selection of actions for follow up.
The statement must be:
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Understandable – everyone in the idea session should be able to describe the objective in common terms.
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Concise – there should be a clear sense of where the limits of this objective are set. If it is defined too widely the session will lose focus. If you feel that the objective is set too widely and the session may drift, you should consider dividing it into multiple, tightly defined objectives that drive sperate idea sessions.
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Accessible – The objective statement should be available to allow all participants to reference it at any time
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Consistent – you should be constantly referring back to this objective. At the beginning and end of each stage you can use this as to ensure that your idea session is not drifting off course.
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It is common for idea sessions to have objective statements that are too broad; as a result, they lose effectiveness as they try to solve too many problems in parallel. If you find this is happening in your session, the best response is to either seek guidance from the sponsor of the session to refine the objective, or to hold an idea generation session to divide the original objective statements into smaller objectives that can be addressed in more manageable separate idea sessions.
Idea generation and limits
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Idea generation sessions can take many forms. You may have a group of people in a room around whiteboards, an online session with many participants, or a closed team working through the objective in isolation. The reason you are in the idea generation process is because the usual day-to-day methods have not been able to address the objectives being discussed. For this reason, it is important to have responses that are as diverse as possible and to allow ideas that are not constrained by current thinking and paradigms
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One option is to involve participants from different backgrounds to introduce diversity of thought. In this case, you may need to review the definition of the objective statement to ensure that it is still understandable for all participants.
If you have built a team of participants with diverse backgrounds, you will see secondary benefits to idea sessions. There is an obvious team building element to having the group work on a common goal, but there is also an opportunity for the participants to return to their teams as advocates for how they were involved in helping the business and that their views were listened to, which will raise the sense of engagement for their entire team.
Participants may also take this opportunity to express views from their teams that the others were not previously aware of; all participants will leave the session with an improved understanding of the challenges the business and other teams are facing.
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Another option to generate novel ideas is to ask the team to assume the hypothetical removal of one of the constraints – what would they do if there was unlimited funding, if a technological barrier were removed, or if they could create an ideal customer. The ideas generated can then be used as a reference direction when the constraints are re-introduced, or to outline a new idea session on how to remove the constraints.
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All the ideas generated by the team should be recorded equally and responded to in the same way; each team member has an equal voice into the session and, at this stage, all ideas are equally valid. Each idea generated will be recorded separately; you will often find that a statement made by a participant crosses more than one idea, so these will be separated out
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Each idea statement must be easily understood; this is not limited to just the participants in this session, but some ideas may be filtered out and re-introduced in other sessions with different participants, so should be clear even if taken out of the context of your idea session.
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The goal here is to generate as many ideas as possible, they will be sorted and refined in later stages. Phrases such as “there is no such thing as a bad idea” are used to inspire this direction and are true to a certain extent: often ideas that are impractical can re-shape understanding of the objective or can provide directional inspiration.
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There are limits though; you will have constraints on the time and resources available for these sessions. To ensure that your session is as effective as possible and to reduce the amount of down-stream sorting and processing of the ideas, you should set boundaries that ensure idea generation is channelled towards a target. This can be with context setting and limiting statements or with the introduction of one or more defined constraints, though you should be careful to avoid excessively restricting idea generation.
Combine and refine
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At the end of the idea generation stage you will have many responses but it is likely there will be either too many to follow up on, or there is no clear indication of what to do next. Or both.
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The next stage will combine these responses where appropriate and apply a filter that will refine and reduce the number for follow up.
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You will start by defining filters that can be applied to test the responses against key criteria for success. You can apply limits such as cost, risk, or current technology constraints. As you test each idea against these constraints, a number will be removed. A good test for constraints has three elements:
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The constraint is clearly described
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The method for testing is clear and consistent
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There is a clear understanding of what a good or bad result looks like.
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Any ideas that do not pass this test are removed and will be retained for future reference, with a record of the reasons why they were filtered out.
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It is important that the ideas are retained for two reasons: you might return to these ideas if the constraints are changed (the removal of these constraints may be the subject of a follow-on idea generation session); it also reinforces to the team that their ideas have value, even if they are not going to be implemented immediately.
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The second step in this stage is to combine and group the responses. You will start by looking for identical responses that can be removed or similar responses that can be reworded slightly and combined into one.
You can then group the responses into themes. The themes will either be pre-defined by the initial guiding statements for the session but will likely evolve from the ideas themselves.
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The purpose of this stage is to create a selection of concepts that will form the scope for projects with clear deliverables that the business can follow up on. If the concepts are not at this level of maturity, then they will form the input for a subsequent idea generation session to mature them further.
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If this point has not been reached, then you should repeat the filter and combination steps with increasingly limiting constraints until you are comfortable that you can move forward. Remembering, of course, that you can always come back to ideas that have been removed at a later date.
Prioritisation for follow up
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The last stage is to take the ideas you have left and to sort them into a prioritised list.
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There are three elements to consider here. The first is the nature of the delivery streams. If you only have one team capable of delivering one project at a time, the priority list becomes very linear and sequential. If you have multiple streams, you may create multiple lists.
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The second consideration is a comparison of benefit against the cost of delivery. This effectively sets the position of the ideas on the list. There is a point here that seems obvious but is often not fully considered: how do you quantify the benefit of each project. Some can be measured in terms of financial opportunity, but many ideas formed in these sessions are not developed to a point where this can be quantified, such as exploration projects which do not deliver an immediate financial pay-out.
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The intent here is to be able to discuss both the benefits and the costs in terms that the participants understand and can be documented for any subsequent teams. Most importantly, the method you use for quantifying the costs and benefit must be able to be applied consistently across all the ideas: prioritisation is a relative measure where the ideas are compared against each other, not necessarily against an absolute scale.
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The third consideration is the level of uncertainty around each idea. A common approach is to apply measures of risk such as the likelihood of the risk and the impact it will have. If your ideas are at an early level of development or are particularly novel, may not be able to predict what is likely to go wrong. You may decide that you don’t understand the behaviours of a market well enough to even predict how they will react, or a technology may be so advanced that it may fail completely.
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In these cases you can apply a subjective measure, but be aware that this is another relative scale, so consistency of approach and clear documentation will ensure that it has validity as a prioritisation measure. You may even consider chartering a further idea generation session to explore and quantify the uncertainty.
Supporting information
You may have noticed that each stage of the process requires the input of reference information: either guiding statements to direct idea generation, or the constraints needed to sort and prioritise the output.
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In an ideal world, you would have all this information ready at the start of the session. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case; the benefit of idea sessions is that they can generate novel solutions to difficult problems. This benefit comes with the cost that you cannot fully predict what information will be needed, so you will have to consider in advance how you will fill the gaps without disrupting the progress of the sessions.
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There are three methods that you should have available to provide this flexibility for your session. The first is to know who the key stakeholders for the output of the session are; there may be an executive champion, a project approver, or even a team that will be responsible for implementation of the output. Your idea session should have immediate access to these stakeholders throughout the session to provide guidance if needed.
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The second method is to apply a new idea generation session within the main session. If you come across a discussion that cannot be resolved, the main session can be paused while you apply the idea generation principles against a new objective statement to develop a direction.
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The third method is to have the team arrive with the ability to access any information or databases that they are likely to need. When you invite the participants to the session, you will give an outline of the objective and should also ask them to consider what they think would be useful sources of information to support the session. You can then ensure that there is easy access to this information during the session.
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One likely source of background information is other idea generation sessions: the idea generation process can be applied across levels of the process that defines the business strategy. A well-developed business strategy is often a series of interlinked idea generation sessions that cascade through the business, refining and exploring objectives, until a project scope can be chartered.
