When people want to develop new ideas, they most often think out of the box in the brainstorming or divergent phase. However, when it comes to convergence, people often end up picking ideas that are most familiar to them. This is called a ‘creative paradox’ or a ‘creadox’.
The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox by forcing people to weigh each idea on 2 parameters.
At IDEO.org we have seven little rules that unlock the creative power of a brainstorming session.
This introvert-friendly brainstorming technique helps groups of any size to generate and build on each other's ideas in a silent but dynamic setting. As the participants keep moving, the exercise is ideal to kick-off a full day workshop or re-energize the group after lunch.
This exercise is preceded by a set of other activities allowing the group to clarify the challenge they want to solve. See how the Four Step Sketch exercise fits into a Design Sprint
A problem solving technique to define a problem, challenge or opportunity and to generate ideas.
Customer experience mapping is a method of documenting and visualizing the experience a customer has as they use the product or service. It also maps out their responses to their experiences.
To be used when there is a solution (even in a conceptual stage) that can be analyzed.
DADs make it easy for a group or community to discover practices and behaviors that enable some individuals (without access to special resources and facing the same constraints) to find better solutions than their peers to common problems. These are called positive deviant (PD) behaviors and practices. DADs make it possible for people in the group, unit, or community to discover by themselves these PD practices.
DADs also create favorable conditions for stimulating participants’ creativity in spaces where they can feel safe to invent new and more effective practices. Resistance to change evaporates as participants are unleashed to choose freely which practices they will adopt or try and which problems they will tackle. DADs make it possible to achieve frontline ownership of solutions.
Open Space is a methodology for large groups to create their agenda discerning important topics for discussion, suitable for conferences, community gatherings and whole system facilitation
Use a remote-friendly version of the classic note and vote exercise to generate ideas quickly, vote on the most suitable, and turn them into how might we statements your group can move forward with!
A questioning method for generating, explaining, investigating ideas.
The sequential building of ideas without evaluation.
Using multiple digital whiteboards, participants float to different whiteboards to add their thoughts, contributions, or questions. Final whiteboards are discussed and reviewed.