THE 6 CREATIVE RULES
Here are some suggestions to get your creative juices flowing:
Go Crazy
Make sure to have lots of fun during the process and do not fear to explore crazy ideas: There are no bad ideas, not at this stage anyway.
More is More
If your first ideas feel boring, keep asking "How else?". Keep churning out ideas even if they feel like bad ideas because bad ideas can sometimes become amazing ones.
Trust the Process
Build on existing methodologies that can increase your chances of success, don't worry about feasibility yet.
Specify, specify, specify
Sometimes it's the details that will make your idea work. Good ideas are specific and well described.
Remix and Improve
Look around you, see what others have done. Look at your team members' ideas and build on them to generate extended ideas.
Give Time
Make sure to use all the time that you have. There is no such thing as "I am done" during the creative phase.
We tend to spend too little time on ideation because we stop when it becomes uncomfortable and it appears there are no ideas left. But the truth is we can develop our creative skills if we spend sufficient time and use a variety of different techniques. And then more innovative ideas will start to surface.
WRITING GOOD IDEAS
Why is it that there are so many good ideas in the air and so few actually implemented? Only those ideas that are described in a specific and vivid manner, will make it to the next stage. Just consider that moment during a brainstorm session, where you pick the best idea. Without knowing, you often pick the one that is described explicitly and speaks to your imagination.
How to do that? Here are 4 principles we recommend to follow as a basic rule, to begin with:
- Write your ideas on post-it notes. Each post-it note should only have one idea.
- Your idea should describe the experience of the user, i.e. what is the user actually doing?
- Write your idea in a complete sentence with at least 5 words.
- Your idea should answer the first 'how' question? - simply look at your idea and ask yourself "how?". Then answer that question, which automatically makes the idea more specific and interesting.
CRAZINESS
As the picture below suggests: We need to go through a bit of struggle and "craziness" before unique ideas can emerge. And using different tools helps you pull a team through that struggle and craziness.
IDEATION TOOLS
This week, we want you to experiment with any of the 3 ideation tools: the "Idea Dump", "Yes, and...", and "What if?". In the task for this week, explore using at least one of these three tools as a way to support creativity in your teams!
IDEA DUMP
A tool to get the first ideas out and allow everyone to contribute and hear their voice
YES, AND
A tool to build on the top of others and prevent idea killing from happening
WHAT IF?
A little push to open doors and help new ideas to keep flowing
DIGITAL COLLABORATION TOOLS
A digital whiteboard tool is a powerful way to support you in creating a face-to-face experience online. It can be accessible to all of your participants, no matter where they are located.
There are three big players in this arena: Miro, Mural and Padlet and they offer a similar suite of tools for online brainstorming, processes, workshops and decision making with digital workspaces that work just as easily as if everyone were in the same room.
We recommend you try them and see which works better for you. As we say at Hyper Island: learn by doing!
EVALUATING THE IDEAS
At some point in your ideation session, you’ll have reached a critical mass of ideas, and it will become unproductive to keep pushing for more. This is referred to as the ‘convergent stage’ where ideas are evaluated, compared, ranked, clustered.
INNOVATION MATRIX
The Innovation Matrix below provides a mechanism for evaluating ideas. The Matrix should contain two axes, with the vertical representing the user needs and the horizontal axis representing the degree of innovation.
DOTMOCRACY
Dotmocracy is a simple method for group prioritization or decision-making. It is an easy, straightforward way to narrow down alternatives and converge to a set of concepts or ideas. It is useful for quickly making decisions in any group situation with multiple options.
In dotmocracy, each individual in a group is given a number of tokens (“dots”) that can be each assigned to an alternative which is part of a set of alternatives.
TIP: You can find creative ways to replace "dots" with other voting ways - like using "likes" if you are working out of a digital communication tool or an online board. 👍👍👍
Creative Challenge!
During this week, your team will need to collectively come-up with the most creative idea for a challenge all teams will work on. At the end of the team task, your team's submission is going to be shared with the community on Workplace.
You have two tasks for this session. These are the last tasks for the week, so make sure to plan enough time to be able to complete both by the end of this week.
Before you start, make sure you have downloaded and got familiar with the Ideation Tools.
1) Individual Task - 🏅up to 25 points🏅
The purpose of the Individual task is for everyone to bring their first ideas to the table. The more ideas you generate the more value you bring to the team session. Remember that at this stage, quantity is more important than quality!
INDIVIDUAL IDEA DUMP (15 mins)
- Individually, think about a minimum of 15 different ways to solve the following challenge:
help families to stay
safe and healthy
during the COV-19 period?"
SUBMIT TO DORIS
- First 10 Ideas 15 Points 🏅🏅🏅
- 5 more ideas + 5 Points 🏅
- 5 more ideas + 5 Points 🏅
Once you have submitted to Doris, write your top 5 best ideas. Each post-it should only have one idea. Remember to follow the principles of writing good ideas presented in this learning kit.
Then you might proceed to the team exercise...
1) Team Task - 🏅50 points🏅
The purpose of the Team Task is to learn how to collectively brainstorm, share and improve ideas in when teams are working remotely. In order to do so, quantity and idea enrichment is necessary.
The biggest challenge of remote meetings is to keep people engaged and interested. This is why we will experiment in running a brainstorm with online tools that can facilitate collaboration.
STEP 1
SET-UP A PADLET WALL (5 mins)
- Choose one team lead to create a free Padlet account - remember there's no need to get the paid plan for this exercise. The lead should also create a wall on padlet for the team to share and co-create ideas later on.
TIP: This exercise can take place online or face-to-face. In the case of face-to-face, the Padlet board would be replaced with post-it notes on a wall.
Once you are all set, book at least a 60 mins online session with your team to co-create and brainstorm ideas together.
STEP 2 APPLYING THE IDEATION TOOLS (30 - 50 mins)
In case this is an online session, remind your team members to stay present, focused while keeping their video camera on during this exercise. This is to make sure the ideation session is as productive as possible.
Once the meeting starts...
- You can start the session with a "check-in" question to energise people at the start. A tip is to create a question that's related to the creative challenge.
- One by one, each team member should add their best 3 - 6 ideas that resulted from the Individual Task on the Padlet link thas should be shared to everyone in the team. Feel free to add images and illustrations to make your ideas visualised and vividly described. This will increase the chances of people to engage with your idea.
- The facilitator should make sure that all of the options on the wall are clear to all members in the group, by running through them one by one and inviting clarifications and further description where necessary.
- As a team, spent at least 30 minutes enriching and generating ideas using the creative tools available in this learning kit. The "What if?" technique helps you to generate more ideas. The "Yes And..." technique helps you to enrich ideas. (check the tools by downloading the Ideation Tools.)
- Once the ideation is finished, as a group, you can organise and evaluate each idea using the Innovation Matrix shared in this learning kit.
- The group will now vote on which options they think are best by using the Dotmocracy tool. Each group member gets 5 dots (or likes 👍) to vote with. These dots can be distributed in any way: one dot each to five different ideas, all five dots to one idea, etc.
- Once all members have distributed their votes, the group could proceed in a variety of ways:
- Simply choose the option/s that received the most dots.
- Conducting an open dialogue about the prioritization. Exploring which ideas got more dots, which got less, what the next steps should be.
- Organize the ideas on a line from most to least dots, then discuss their relative merits.
NOTE: Remember to take a screenshot or a picture of your team in action to share it on Workplace!
STEP 4 DETAIL YOUR SUBMISSION (10 mins)
As a team, re-describe the selected idea by answering these 3 questions:
-
- What is the Name of the best idea?
- Describe the User's experience: How is the user experiencing your idea? Remember to be descriptive and detailed in your answer!
- Create a rapid visualisation of your idea (Ex: a drawing, a sketch, a rapid prototype)
SUBMIT TO DORIS
Doris will ask each team member to reflect individually by answering the questions:
- How did using these creative techniques and tools made you feel? What did you learn by trying them?
- Describe one problem in your current job/role that you would like to start applying ideation techniques to help you solve
- Describe one step you will start taking today to allow creativity to flourish in your team…
- The Name of the idea
- A description of the idea, including the experience of the user
- Rapid visualisation of the idea
- A link or a screenshot with the Padlet board created by your team
